Lillian Pierce
Born1980
Alma mater
Employer
Awards

Lillian Beatrix Pierce is a mathematician whose research connects number theory with harmonic analysis.[1] She is a professor of mathematics at Duke University.[2]

Early life and education

Pierce was home-schooled in Fallbrook, California[1][3][4] and began playing the violin at age four.[5] By age 11 she began performing professionally as a violinist.[1] As a teenager, she also started taking classes at a local community college, accumulating so many units that some of the universities she applied to refused to consider her for freshman admission.[5] She entered Princeton University majoring in mathematics but intending to pursue an MD–PhD program;[6] under the influence of faculty mentor and undergraduate thesis supervisor Elias M. Stein, her interests shifted towards pure mathematics.[1][6][3] As an undergraduate, she also became an intern at the National Security Agency.[1] She was Princeton's 2002 valedictorian and became a Rhodes Scholar, repeating two accomplishments of her brother Niles Pierce from nine years earlier.[3]

She earned a master's degree at the University of Oxford in 2004.[2][1] Returning to Princeton for doctoral study in mathematics, she completed her Ph.D. in 2009. Her dissertation, Discrete Analogues in Harmonic Analysis, was supervised by Stein.[2][7]

Career

After postdoctoral studies with Roger Heath-Brown at Oxford and at the Hausdorff Center for Mathematics in Bonn, Germany, she became an assistant professor at Duke in 2014.[2][1]

Research

Pierce was one of the first mathematicians to prove nontrivial upper bounds on the number of elements of finite order in an ideal class group.[8]

Awards and honors

Pierce won the 2018 Sadosky Prize for research that "spans and connects a broad spectrum of problems ranging from character sums in number theory to singular integral operators in Euclidean spaces" including in particular "a polynomial Carleson theorem for manifolds".[9] She received the 2019 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers.[10] She was elected a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society in the class of 2021 "for contributions to number theory and harmonic analysis".[11]

Personal life

Her husband, Tobias Overath, also works at Duke as a neuroscientist.[1]

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Smith, Robin (September 26, 2014), "Lillian Pierce: A head for pure mathematics", Duke Today, Duke University
  2. 1 2 3 4 Curriculum vitae (PDF), July 2017, retrieved 2018-05-12
  3. 1 2 3 Stevens, Ruth (June 3, 2002), "Selection as valedictorian a family affair for the Pierces", Princeton Weekly Bulletin, Princeton University, 92 (27)
  4. ↑ Nussbaum, Debra (May 21, 2000), "Home Schooling Graduates; Students, Jittery About College at First, Are Doing Well Academically and Fitting In Socially", The New York Times
  5. 1 2 Stevens, Ruth (March 5, 2001), "Inclined to succeed: USA Today First-teamer Lillian Pierce pursues interests ranging from mathematics to music", Princeton Weekly Bulletin, 90 (19)
  6. 1 2 Flapan, Laure (November 2017), Diaz-Lopez, Alexander (ed.), "Lillian Pierce Interview" (PDF), Notices of the American Mathematical Society, 64 (10): 1170–1172, doi:10.1090/noti1586
  7. ↑ Lillian Pierce at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  8. ↑ Hartnett, Kevin (March 2, 2017), "New Number Systems Seek Their Lost Primes", Quanta Magazine
  9. ↑ "Pierce Awarded Sadosky Prize" (PDF), Mathematics People, Notices of the American Mathematical Society, 64 (8): 925, September 2017
  10. ↑ "President Donald J. Trump Announces Recipients of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers", whitehouse.gov, 2019-07-02, retrieved 2019-08-03 – via National Archives
  11. ↑ "2021 Class of Fellows". American Mathematical Society. Retrieved 2 November 2020.

Further reading

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