Frances Kirwan

Frances Kirwan
Born	Frances Clare Kirwan (1959-08-21) August 21, 1959 United Kingdom
Occupation	Mathematician
Years active	1983–present
Known for	Algebraic geometry, symplectic geometry, Kirwan map

Dame Frances Clare Kirwan, born on 21 August 1959, is a distinguished British mathematician currently holding the position of Savilian Professor of Geometry at the University of Oxford. Her expertise lies in the fields of algebraic and symplectic geometry.

Education

Kirwan completed her secondary education at Oxford High School before pursuing mathematics at Clare College, part of the University of Cambridge. She obtained her D.Phil. from Oxford University in 1984, submitting a thesis entitled The Cohomology of Quotients in Symplectic and Algebraic Geometry, under the supervision of Michael Atiyah.

Research

Her scholarly interests encompass the study of moduli spaces within algebraic geometry, as well as geometric invariant theory (GIT), particularly exploring the interplay between GIT and moment maps in the context of symplectic geometry. Kirwan’s investigations seek to characterize geometric entities via their algebraic and topological attributes, notably introducing what is now known as the Kirwan map.

Between 1983 and 1985, she was a junior fellow at Harvard, followed by a Fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford until 1986. Subsequently, she became a Fellow at Balliol College, Oxford. Kirwan holds honorary fellowships at both Clare College, Cambridge and Magdalen College.

In 1996, she was granted the Title of Distinction of Professor of Mathematics. From 2004 to 2006, Kirwan presided over the London Mathematical Society, distinguishing herself as its second-youngest and second female president. In 2005, she secured a five-year Senior Research Fellowship from the EPSRC, supporting her research into moduli spaces of complex algebraic curves.

Her election as the first female Savilian Professor of Geometry came in 2017, accompanied by a transition to New College, Oxford, while she was appointed emeritus fellow at Balliol. Kirwan also played a leading role in organising meetings for European Women in Mathematics, convening the 2008–09 session and acting as deputy convenor for the 2010–11 gathering.

Prizes, awards and scholarships

• Recipient of the London Mathematical Society’s Whitehead Prize, 1989
• Elected Fellow of the Royal Society, 2001
• President of the London Mathematical Society, 2003–2005
• Holder of an EPSRC Senior Research Fellowship (2005–2010) for work in algebraic geometry
• Fellow of the American Mathematical Society, 2012
• Awarded the London Mathematical Society Senior Whitehead Prize, 2013
• Honoured as a DBE for contributions to mathematics, 2014
• Recipient of the Maths and Computing Suffrage Science award, 2016
• Member of the prestigious Academia Europaea
• Chairperson of the United Kingdom Mathematics Trust
• Awarded The Royal Society’s Sylvester Medal, 2021
• Conferred honorary doctorates by both the University of York (2020) and the University of St Andrews (2022)
• Laureate for Europe – Mathematics in the 2023 L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Awards

Additionally, Kirwan participated on the selection panel that awarded the prestigious Fields Medal to mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani.

Publications

• Cohomology of Quotients in Symplectic and Algebraic Geometry, Princeton University Press, 1984
• An Introduction to Intersection Homology Theory, Longman Scientific and Technical, 1988; second edition co-authored with Jonathan Woolf, CRC Press, 2006
• Complex Algebraic Curves, Cambridge University Press, 1992

External links

• University of Oxford Mathematical Institute profile