Stephanie B. Alexander

The mathematician Stephanie Alexander stands in front of a steel plate sculpture of the Boy Surface.
Stephanie Alexander at Oberwolfach.

Stephanie Brewster Brewer Taylor Alexander (September 1, 1941 – November 20, 2023)[1] was an American mathematician, a professor of mathematics at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.[2] Her research concerned differential geometry and metric spaces.[3]

Biography

Alexander was born in Los Angeles and raised in Vancouver, British Columbia, and London, Ontario. She was a graduate of Mount Holyoke College.[4]

She earned her Ph.D. from UIUC in 1967, under the supervision of Richard L. Bishop, with a thesis entitled Reducibility of Euclidean Immersions of Low Codimensions.[5] After joining the UIUC faculty as a half-time instructor, she became a regular faculty member in 1972.[3] She retired in 2009[6] and died in 2023.[4]

Mathematical Work

Alexander's most significant achievements were in relation to the study of metric spaces with curvature bounds. Of particular importance was her work with Bishop to establish a concept of curvature bounds in the style of Alexandrov geometry for semi-Riemannian manifolds and Lorentzian manifolds, an early step towards the development of synthetic geometry in a Lorentzian setting.[7]

Books

  • With Vitali Kapovitch and Anton Petrunin, Alexander authored the book An Invitation to Alexandrov Geometry: CAT(0) Spaces (Springer, 2019).

Recognition

  • At Illinois, Alexander won the Luckman Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award and the William Prokasy Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 1993.[6]
  • In 2014 she was elected as a fellow of the American Mathematical Society "for contributions to geometry, for high-quality exposition, and for exceptional teaching of mathematics."[8]

References

  1. ^ Crematory, Renner-Wikoff Chapel &. "Obituary for Stephanie Alexander | Renner-Wikoff Chapel & Crematory". Obituary for Stephanie Alexander | Renner-Wikoff Chapel & Crematory. Retrieved 2024-02-17.
  2. ^ Emeritus faculty, UIUC Mathematics, retrieved 2014-06-16.
  3. ^ a b "Distinguished Mathematical Research award recipients" (PDF), Math Times, UIUC Mathematics Department: 3, Fall 2004, archived from the original (PDF) on 2015-04-19.
  4. ^ a b "Stephanie Alexander Obituary (2023) - Urbana, IL - The News-Gazette". Legacy.com. Retrieved 2023-12-09.
  5. ^ Stephanie Brewster Brewer Taylor Alexander at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  6. ^ a b Mathematics Calendar 2012 (PDF), UIUC Mathematics Department, p. October
  7. ^ Alexander, Stephanie B.; Bishop, Richard L. (2008-04-15), Lorentz and semi-Riemannian spaces with Alexandrov curvature bounds, doi:10.48550/arXiv.0804.2493, retrieved 2024-12-03
  8. ^ 2014 Class of the Fellows of the AMS, retrieved 2014-06-16.