Karen Uhlenbeck was the first woman to win an Abel prize.
One of the events that stood out over the last year was the fact that the Abel Prize, one of the highest honours in mathematics, was for the first time ever awarded to a woman: Karen Keskulla Uhlenbeck. Uhlenbeck's body of work covers a dizzying array of areas in a truly pioneering spirit. In our article, published when the prize was awarded, we looked a chunk of this huge body of work which focussed on minimal surfaces. You can read the article here.
While we didn't get the chance to meet Uhlenbeck herself, we did, as always, work with a number of interesting female mathematicians and physicists over the last year. To celebrate them, we bring you this collection of short videos of women talking about their work. Enjoy!
Maria Ubiali — In the old days the job of physicists was to explain the things we observe in the world around us. In modern physics explanation often comes before observation. It is then the job of phenomenologists, like Ubiali, to work out how the theories can be tested by experiments.
Nadia Bahjat-Abbas — Modern physics has a problem: the theory that describes the world at very small scales and the theory that describes it at large scales don't fit together. Nadia Bahjat-Abbas works on the double copy, a programme to find mathematical similarities between the two conflicting theories.
Adele Jackson — Jackson talks about her work on topology, inspired by spheres, doghnuts, and the power of maths to capture intuition. We talked to her at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum 2019.
Dragana Radojicic — Radojicic talks about financial maths, the nature of research, and women in maths and computer science. We talked to her at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum 2019.
Harini Hapuarachchi — Hapuarachchi talks about how work investigating the interaction of light and matter on the nanoscale, and some important applications. We talked to her at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum 2019.
Janelle Mason — Mason tells us how computer algorithms can help investigate crime scenes. We talked to her at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum 2019.
Sophie Huiberts — Huiberts tells us how computer algorithms that, in theory, are hopelessly inefficient, perform extraordinary well in practice. We talked to her at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum 2019.