Karen Smith (mathematician)

Karen Ellen Smith (born 9 May 1965, Red Bank, New Jersey) is an American mathematician, specializing in commutative algebra and algebraic geometry. She completed her bachelor's degree in mathematics at Princeton University before earning her PhD in mathematics at the University of Michigan in 1993. Currently she is the Keeler Professor of Mathematics at the University of Michigan. In addition to being a researcher in algebraic geometry and commutative algebra, Smith with others wrote the textbook An Invitation to Algebraic Geometry.

Biography

Smith graduated in 1987 with a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Princeton University, where she was influenced in her freshman year by Charles Fefferman. She was a high school mathematics teacher in the academic year 1987/1988. In 1988 she became a graduate student at the University of Michigan, where in 1993 she earned her PhD with thesis Tight closure of parameter ideals and f-rationality under the supervision of Melvin Hochster. In the academic year 1993–1994 she was a postdoc at Purdue University working with Craig Huneke. In 1994 she became a C.L.E. Moore Instructor and then an associate professor at MIT. Since 1997 she has been a professor at the University of Michigan.

In 1991 she married the Finnish mathematician Juha Heinonen who died in 2007. The marriage produced three children, Sanelma and twins, Tapio and Helena. Smith is regularly a visiting professor at the University of Jyväskylä.

Honors

In 2001 Smith won the Ruth Lyttle Satter Prize in Mathematics for her development of tight closure methods, introduced by Hochster and Huneke, in commutative algebra and her application of these methods in algebraic geometry.^[1] In addition to the Satter Prize, Smith was the recipient of a 1997 Sloan Research Fellowship,^[2] a Fulbright award, and a University of Michigan Faculty Recognition Award for outstanding contributions as a teacher, scholar and member of the University community.^[3] Smith was selected to give the 2015 Earle Raymond Hedrick Lectures at the Mathematical Association of America's MathFest.^[4] Smith was chosen to give the Association for Women in Mathematics-American Mathematical Society 2016 Noether Lecture at the Joint Mathematics Meetings.^[5] In 2015 she was elected as a fellow of the American Mathematical Society "for contributions to commutative algebra and algebraic geometry."^[6]

Writings

• with Lauri Kahanpää, Pekka Kekäläinen, William Traves An invitation to algebraic geometry. Springer Verlag 2000, 2004 (lectures delivered in Finland), ISBN 0-387-98980-3.
• with János Kollár, Alessio Corti: Rational and nearly rational algebraic varieties. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2004.

References

External links

• Homepage
• Satter Prize for Smith, Notices AMS, pdf
• O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Karen Smith", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews .