Olivia Caramello

Olivia Caramello is an Italian mathematician. She holds a national Rita Levi-Montalcini associate professorship at the University of Insubria in Como, Italy, and Gelfand Chair at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques, France. She is known for her work in topos theory and for pioneering the technique of toposes as bridges. She authored the 2017 book Theories, Sites, Toposes: Relating and studying mathematical theories through topos-theoretic bridges.

Caramello organized international conferences in topos theory, "Topos à l'IHES" (2015). and "Toposes in Como" (2018) She is an editor of the journal Logica Universalis and is running a blog and forum about toposes.

In 2015 Caramello had a public controversy with a number of senior exponents of the category theory community, whom she accused of spreading negative ungrounded opinions on her work; her case is discussed in an academic paper.

Caramello was awarded the AILA (Associazione Italiana di Logica e sue Applicazioni) Prize in 2011, a "L'Oréal-Unesco Fellowship for Women in Science" in 2014 and a "Rita Levi Montalcini" position of the Italian Ministry for Education, University and Research in 2017.

In 2009, she obtained her Ph.D. in Mathematics at the University of Cambridge (UK), as a Prince of Wales Student of Trinity College, with a thesis entitled "The duality between Grothendieck toposes and geometric theories" under the supervision of Peter Johnstone. In 2016, she obtained her Habilitation at Paris Diderot University with a habilitation thesis entitled "Grothendieck toposes as unifying bridges in Mathematics".