(Text by Jenneke Krüger) Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) was the daughter of an upper-class English family; so she was supposed to use her education to take part in polite conversations and catch a suitable husband. Instead she studied at home, collected data on health care and death rates, used convincing graphic …
(Text by Jenneke Krüger) The BBC named Karen ‘the bubble maths researcher’. There are two main reasons for this. Firstly, Uhlenbeck studied a special kind of surfaces and discovered that, when zooming in on these surfaces, the mathematical equivalent to tiny bubbles appeared –therefore Uhlenbeck named this technique ‘bubbling’. In …
(Text by Jenneke Krüger) Karen Uhlenbeck (1942, Cleveland, Ohio, USA) is the eldest of four children; her mother, Carolyn Windeler Keskulla, was an artist and schoolteacher and her father, Arnold Keskulla, was an engineer. The family lived in a rural community; Karen liked (and likes) to spend time outdoors, but …
Karen Uhlenbeck is the first female mathematician who wins the Abel prize. This prestigious prize is named after the Norwegian mathematician Niels Henrik Abel. The prize is awarded to laureates who have made extraordinary contributions to the field of mathematics. The Abel Committee recognized Uhlenbeck “for her pioneering achievements in …
