Sunday, October 8, 2017

McDuff is currently a professor at

Barnard College. Before that, she was at Stony Brook University for many years. She has won major prizes, including the Satter PrizeSenior Berwick Prize, and Steele Prize, and received honorary doctorates from several universities. She was at MathFest to give the Hedrick lecture series and co-organize research talk sessions in symplectic geometry.
Symplectic geometry is a cousin of complex geometry. Complex here doesn’t mean complicated but refers to the complex plane, a two-dimensional plane with a real axis and an imaginary axis, where complex numbers like 2+3i live. There’s also a 4-dimensional version of the complex plane, and 6-dimensional, and 8-dimensional, and so on. Likewise, symplectic geometry can inhabit spaces of any even dimension.