Origins & Early Life

Karen Keskulla Uhlenbeck ForMemRS (born August 24, 1942) is an American mathematician and one of the founders of modern geometric analysis. She is a professor emerita of mathematics at the University of Texas at Austin, where she held the Sid W. Richardson Foundation Regents Chair. She is currently a distinguished visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study and a visiting senior research scholar at Princeton University.

Pivotal Works & Achievements

Uhlenbeck was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2007. She won the 2019 Abel Prize for "her pioneering achievements in geometric partial differential equations, gauge theory, and integrable systems, and for the fundamental impact of her work on analysis, geometry and mathematical physics." She is the first, and so far only, woman to win the prize since its inception in 2003. She donated half of the prize money to organizations which promote more engagement of women and other minorities in research mathematics. Uhlenbeck was born in Cleveland, Ohio, to engineer Arnold Keskulla and schoolteacher and artist Carolyn Windeler Keskulla. While she was a child, the family moved to New Jersey.

Enduring Legacy & Impact

Uhlenbeck's maiden name, Keskulla, comes...

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