Jenny Harrison

In 1986, after being denied tenure at Berkeley, Harrison filed a lawsuit based on gender discrimination. Stephen Smale and Robion Kirby were the most vocal opponents to her receiving tenure during the case, while Morris Hirsch and James Yorke were her most vocal supporters. The 1993 settlement led to a new review of her work by a panel of seven mathematicians and science faculty who unanimously recommended tenure as a full professor

As a graduate student at the University of Warwick, where Zeeman introduced her to Plateau's problem. She found a counterexample to the Seifert conjecture at Oxford. In a Berkeley seminar in 1983 she proposed the existence of a general theory linking these together, and the theory of differential chains began to evolve. Jenny Harrison and Harrison Pugh proved that the topological vector space of differential chains satisfies a universal property determined by two natural axioms. They have used the theory to provide the first universal solution to Plateau's problem, including soap film regularity, building upon Harrison's earlier paper. Recently, Fried and Seguin have found a broad generalization to Reynolds transport theorem using the methods of differential chains.

Harrison grew up in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. On graduating from the University of Alabama, she won a Marshall Scholarship which she used to fund her graduate studies at the University of Warwick. She completed her doctorate there in 1975, supervised by Christopher Zeeman. Hassler Whitney was her postdoctoral adviser at the Institute for Advanced Study, and she was also one of the Miller Research Fellows at Berkeley. She was on the tenured faculty at the University of Oxford (Somerville College) from 1978 to 1981, before returning to Berkeley as an assistant professor.