21 Facts About Dusa McDuff

Dusa McDuff FRS CorrFRSE was born on 18 October 1945 and is an English mathematician who works on symplectic geometry.

Dusa McDuff was the first recipient of the Ruth Lyttle Satter Prize in Mathematics, was a Noether Lecturer, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Dusa McDuff 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.

Dusa McDuff's sister is the anthropologist Caroline Humphrey, and she has an elder half-brother C Jake Waddington by her father's first marriage.

Dusa McDuff's mother was the daughter of Amber Reeves, the noted feminist, author and lover of H G Wells.

Dusa McDuff grew up in Scotland where her father was Professor of Genetics at the University of Edinburgh.

Dusa 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, Dusa McDuff had an exceptionally good mathematics teacher.

Dusa McDuff graduated with a BSc Hons in 1967, going on to Girton College, Cambridge as a doctoral student.

Dusa McDuff 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's husband was studying the Russian Symbolist poet Innokenty Annensky.

Dusa McDuff once said about a long paper bristling with formulas that it contained the vague beginnings of an idea which he could only hint at and which he had never managed to bring out more clearly.

On returning to Cambridge Dusa McDuff started attending Frank Adams's topology lectures and was invited to teach at the University of York.

Dusa McDuff then returned to England, where she took up a lectureship at the University of Warwick.

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

Dusa McDuff gave the first example of symplectic forms on a closed manifold that are cohomologous but not diffeomorphic and classified the rational and ruled symplectic four-manifolds, completed with Francois Lalonde.

Dusa McDuff has worked on embedding capacities of 4-dimensional symplectic ellipsoids with Felix Schlenk, which gives rise to some very interesting number-theoretical questions.

Dusa 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, a Noether Lecturer and a member of both the United States National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

Dusa McDuff was a Plenary Lecturer at the 1998 International Congress of Mathematicians and an Invited Speaker at the 1990 ICM.

Dusa McDuff is a member of the Academia Europaea, and is part of the 2019 class of fellows of the Association for Women in Mathematics.

For 2025 McDuff was awarded the AMS Leroy P Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement.