Chelsea Walton

Chelsea Walton
Walton at Oberwolfach in 2014
Born1983 (age 40–41)
Detroit, Michigan, U.S.
Alma mater
Awards
Scientific career
FieldsMathematics
InstitutionsRice University
Thesis On Degenerations and Deformations of Sklyanin Algebras  (2011)
Doctoral advisors
Websitemath.rice.edu/~notlaw

Chelsea Walton is an American mathematician whose research interests include noncommutative algebra, noncommutative algebraic geometry, symmetry in quantum mechanics, Hopf algebras, and quantum groups. She is an associate professor at Rice University and a Sloan Research Fellow.[1]

Education and career

Walton is African-American,[2] originally from Detroit, Michigan,[3] and was educated in the Detroit public schools.[4] As a child she made a letter frequency table from her children's dictionary,[1] and as a high school student, seeking a way to "do logic puzzles all day and get paid for this",[2] she was already planning a career as a mathematics professor.[3]

She graduated from Michigan State University in 2005,[5] and completed her PhD at the University of Michigan in 2011. Her dissertation, On Degenerations and Deformations of Sklyanin Algebras,[6] was jointly supervised by Toby Stafford [de] and Karen E. Smith,[7] and based in part on her work as a visiting student at the University of Manchester, where Stafford had moved.[8]

Walton did postdoctoral research at the University of Washington and the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, and became a C. L. E. Moore instructor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 2012 to 2015.[8] She came to Temple University as Selma Lee Bloch Brown Assistant Professor of Mathematics in 2015 [1]. She moved to the University of Illinois in 2018.[5][4] She joined the faculty at Rice University in 2020.[9]

Recognition

Walton was named a Sloan Fellow in 2017, becoming the fourth African-American to win a Sloan Fellowship in mathematics.[1] Walton was also recognized by Mathematically Gifted & Black as a Black History Month 2017 Honoree.[2] In 2018 she won the André Lichnerowicz Prize in Poisson geometry, the first woman to be awarded this prize.[10] The award citation noted her research on Sklyanin algebras in Poisson geometry, on the actions of Hopf algebras, and on the universal enveloping algebra of the Witt algebra.[11] She was elected as a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society, in the 2025 class of fellows.[12]

References

  1. ^ a b c d "Temple mathematician Chelsea Walton named a 2017 Sloan Research Fellow", Temple Now, Temple University, March 7, 2017
  2. ^ a b c "Chelsea Walton", Mathematically Gifted and Black: Black History Month 2017 Honoree, retrieved 2018-10-18
  3. ^ a b Paoletta, Rae (March 8, 2017), "These Black Female Mathematicians Should Be Stars in the Blockbusters of Tomorrow", Gizmodo
  4. ^ a b Readdy, Margaret A.; Taylor, Christine (March 2018), "Chelsea Walton" (PDF), Women's History Month, Notices of the American Mathematical Society, 65 (3): 296–297
  5. ^ a b Bursztynsky, Jessica; Evensen, Dave (September 13, 2018), New faculty join the College of LAS, University of Illinois College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, retrieved 2018-10-19
  6. ^ Walton, C. M. (2011). On degenerations and deformations of Sklyanin algebras (Doctoral dissertation, University of Michigan).
  7. ^ Chelsea Walton at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  8. ^ a b Curriculum vitae (PDF), retrieved 2020-07-01
  9. ^ Chelsea Walton, retrieved 2020-07-06
  10. ^ Chelsea Walton and Brent Prym win 2018 André Lichnerowicz Prize in Poisson Geometry, International Mathematical Union Committee for Women in Mathematics, August 20, 2018
  11. ^ André Lichnerowicz Prize in Poisson geometry (PDF), Fields Institute, 2018, retrieved 2018-10-19
  12. ^ 2025 Class of Fellows of the AMS, American Mathematical Society, retrieved 2024-11-01

Further reading