Mathematician receives award to fund collaborative research

Maria Gordina, associate professor of mathematics in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, will spend a semester in residence at Cornell University as the winner of the Ruth I. Michler Memorial Prize awarded by Cornell and the Association for Women in Mathematics.

The award will fund her residency to study infinite dimensional spaces, a research project that involves collaborations with a physicist and two other mathematicians, one of whom was her Ph.D. adviser at Cornell.

Among the questions she will study are the geometry of infinite dimensional curved spaces and random processes in these spaces, such as Brownian motion, a mathematical model used to describe the random movement of particles suspended in a liquid or gas.

A typical example of an infinite dimensional curved space is a “loop group,” which can be visualized as many loops drawn around a sphere or any other curved object.

The Michler prize is named in memory of a young mathematician at the University of North Texas who died in 2000 in a tragic accident when she was a visiting scholar at Northeastern University.

Ruth Michler’s parents established the prize at Cornell because Michler was born in Ithaca when her father, a German mathematician, was visiting the university.

The $45,000 prize honors mid-career faculty women in mathematics and provides an opportunity for them to focus on research, with no teaching obligations.