Dusa McDuff

In 2010, she was awarded the Senior Berwick Prize of the London Mathematical Society. For 2017 she received, jointly with Dietmar Salamon, the AMS Leroy P. Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition. In 2018 she received the Sylvester Medal by the Royal Society.

McDuff was the first to be awarded the Satter Prize, in 1991, for her work on symplectic geometry; she is a Fellow of the Royal Society (1994), a Noether Lecturer (1998) and a member of both the United States National Academy of Sciences (1999) and the American Philosophical Society (2013). In 2008 she was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. She was a Plenary Lecturer at the 1998 International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) and an Invited Speaker at the 1990 ICM. In 2012 she became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. In 1999, she was the first female Hardy Lecturer, an award from the London Mathematical Society. She is also a member of the Academia Europaea, and is part of the 2019 class of fellows of the Association for Women in Mathematics.

Around this time she met mathematician John Milnor who was then based in Princeton University. To live closer to him she took up an untenured assistant professorship at the Stony Brook University. Now an independent mathematician, she began work on the relationship between diffeomorphisms and the classifying space for foliations. She has since worked on symplectic topology. In the spring of 1985, McDuff attended the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques in Paris to study Mikhael Gromov's work on elliptic methods. Since 2007, she has held the Helen Lyttle Kimmel chair at Barnard College.

In 1984 McDuff married Milnor, now a professor at Stony Brook University, and a Fields medallist, Wolf Prize winner and Abel Prize Laureate.

On returning to Cambridge McDuff started attending Frank Adams's topology lectures and was soon invited to teach at the University of York. In 1975 she separated from her husband, and was divorced in 1978. At the University of York, she "essentially wrote a second PhD" while working with Graeme Segal. At this time a position at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) opened up for her, reserved for visiting female mathematicians. Her career as a mathematician developed further while at MIT, and soon she was accepted to the Institute for Advanced Study where she worked with Segal on the Atiyah–Segal completion theorem. She then returned to England, where she took up a lectureship at the University of Warwick.

After completing her doctorate in 1971 McDuff was appointed to a two-year Science Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship at Cambridge. Following her husband, the literary translator David McDuff, she left for a six-month visit to Moscow. Her husband was studying the Russian Symbolist poet Innokenty Annensky. Though McDuff had no specific plans it turned out to be a profitable visit for her mathematically. There, she met Israel Gelfand in Moscow who gave her a deeper appreciation of mathematics. McDuff later wrote:

Turning down a scholarship to the University of Cambridge to stay with her boyfriend in Scotland, she enrolled at the University of Edinburgh. She graduated with a BSc Hons in 1967, going on to Girton College, Cambridge as a doctoral student. Here, under the guidance of mathematician George A. Reid, McDuff worked on problems in functional analysis. She solved a problem on Von Neumann algebras, constructing infinitely many different factors of type II1, and published the work in the Annals of Mathematics.

Dusa McDuff FRS CorrFRSE (born 18 October 1945) is an English mathematician who works on symplectic geometry. She was the first recipient of the Ruth Lyttle Satter Prize in Mathematics, was a Noether Lecturer, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society. She is currently the Helen Lyttle Kimmel '42 Professor of Mathematics at Barnard College.

Margaret Dusa Waddington was born in London, England, on 18 October 1945 to Edinburgh architect Margaret Justin Blanco White, second wife of biologist Conrad Hal Waddington, her father. Her sister is the anthropologist Caroline Humphrey, and she has an elder half-brother C. Jake Waddington by her father's first marriage. Her mother was the daughter of Amber Reeves, the noted feminist, author and lover of H. G. Wells. McDuff grew up in Scotland where her father was Professor of Genetics at the University of Edinburgh. McDuff was educated at St George's School for Girls in Edinburgh and, although the standard was lower than at the corresponding boys' school, The Edinburgh Academy, McDuff had an exceptionally good mathematics teacher. She writes: