Kate Okikiolu

Kate Adebola Okikiolu
Born1965 (age 60–61)
Alma materUniversity of Cambridge
UCLA
AwardsPresidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers[1]
Scientific career
FieldsMathematical analysis
Elliptic operators
WorkplacesPrinceton University
UCSD
Johns Hopkins University
Thesis The Analogue of the Strong Szego Limit Theorem on the Torus and the 3-Sphere  (1991)
Sun-Yung Alice Chang
John B. Garnett

Kate Adebola Okikiolu (born 1965) is a British mathematician.[2] She is known for her work with elliptic differential operators as well as her work with inner-city children.[3]

Early life and education

Okikiolu was born in 1965 in England. Her father was George Olatokunbo Okikiolu, a renowned Nigerian mathematician[4] and the most published black mathematician on record.[5] Her British mother was a high school mathematics teacher. Okikiolu received a B.A. in mathematics from Cambridge University in 1987. In 1991 she earned her Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California at Los Angeles,[6] for her thesis The Analogue of the Strong Szego Limit Theorem on the Torus and the 3-Sphere.[5][7][8]

Career

Based on her PhD work, Okikiolu resolved a conjecture of Peter Wilcox Jones concerning a continuous version of the travelling salesman problem[9] in her paper Characterization of subsets of rectifiable curves in Rn.[10] Okikiolu was an instructor and later assistant professor at Princeton University from 1993 to 1995. She then worked as a visiting assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and joined the faculty at the University of California at San Diego in 1995.[7] In 2011 she joined the Mathematics Department at Johns Hopkins University.[11]

She was an invited speaker at the 1996 meeting of the Association of Women in Mathematics.[12] She also delivered the Claytor-Woodard lecture at the 2002 meeting of the National Association of Mathematicians, an organization for African-American mathematicians.[7]

Honors and awards

In 1997, Okikiolu won a Sloan Research Fellowship,[13] becoming the first black recipient of this fellowship. In 1997 she also was awarded a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers[14] for both her mathematical research and her development of mathematics curricula for inner-city school children. This award is given to only 60 scientists and engineers each year and has a prize of $500,000.[7] In 2009, she presented the Etta Z. Falconer Lecture on "The Sum of Squares of Wavelengths of a Closed Surface"[15] an award given by the AWM for women with distinguished careers in mathematics or mathematics education.

References

  1. ↑ O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Kate Okikiolu", MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrews
  2. ↑ "Katherine Okikiolu - Mathematicians of the African Diaspora". www.math.buffalo.edu. Retrieved 2020-06-10.
  3. ↑ "Katherine Okikiolu - Biography". Maths History. Retrieved 2022-08-10.
  4. ↑ "Katherine Okikiolu - Biography". Maths History. Retrieved 2022-08-11.
  5. 1 2 Paulus Gerdes (2007). African Doctorates in Mathematics. African Mathematical Union. Commission on the History of Mathematics in Africa. p. 26. ISBN 9781430318675.
  6. ↑ "Katherine Okikiolu - Mathematicians of the African Diaspora". www.math.buffalo.edu. Retrieved 2022-08-11.
  7. 1 2 3 4 Spangenburg, Ray; Moser, Kit (2003). African Americans in science, math, and invention. New York, NY: Facts on File. ISBN 0816048061.
  8. ↑ Kate Okikiolu at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  9. ↑ Williams, Scott W. (2008). "Black Women in Mathematics". Retrieved 11 August 2022.
  10. ↑ Okikiolu, Kathleen (1992). "Characterization of subsets of rectifiable curves in Rn" (PDF). J. London Math. Soc. 46 (2): 336–348. doi:10.1112/jlms/s2-46.2.336. Archived from the original (PDF) on 21 June 2020. Retrieved 20 June 2020.
  11. ↑ "Meet Katherine Okikiolu". The Stemettes Zine. Retrieved 2022-08-11.
  12. ↑ "Women and Minorities in Mathematics". cs.appstate.edu. Archived from the original on 2022-10-20. Retrieved 2022-08-11.
  13. ↑ Past Fellows, Sloan Foundation, archived from the original on 2018-03-14, retrieved 2019-09-09
  14. ↑ "The Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers: Recipient Details | NSF - National Science Foundation". www.nsf.gov. Retrieved 2022-08-11.
  15. ↑ "Falconer Lectures". Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM). Retrieved 2026-04-10.
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