Dame Frances Clare Kirwan (born 21 August 1959) is a British mathematician, currently Savilian Professor of Geometry at the University of Oxford. Her fields of specialisation are algebraic and symplectic geometry.Oxford University Calendar 2004-05, Oxford University Press (2004).Professor Frances Kirwan profile , Faces of Mathematics; accessed 23 March 2022.
Education Kirwan was educated at Oxford High School, and studied maths as an undergraduate at Clare College, Cambridge. She took a DPhil degree at Oxford in 1984, with the dissertation title The Cohomology of Quotients in Symplectic and Algebraic Geometry, which was supervised by Michael Atiyah.
Research Kirwan's research interests include moduli spaces in algebraic geometry, geometric invariant theory (GIT), and in the link between GIT and moment maps in symplectic geometry.Prof Kirwan profile , europeanwomeninmaths.org; accessed 9 May 2014. Her work endeavours to understand the structure of geometric objects by investigation of their algebraic and topological properties.Prof Kirwan profile , macs.hw.ac.uk; accessed 9 May 2014. She introduced the Kirwan map.
From 1983 to 1985, she held a junior fellowship at Harvard. From 1983 to 1986, she held a Fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford, before becoming a Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford.Academia Europaea member profile, retrieved 22 June 2014. She is an honorary fellow of Clare College, Cambridge and also at Magdalen College.
In 1996, she was awarded the Title of Distinction of Professor of Mathematics. From 2004 to 2006, she was president of the London Mathematical Society, the second-youngest president in the society's history and only the second woman to be president."President Designate of the London Mathematical Society", Mathematical Institute News, University of Oxford, 2004. In 2005, she received a five-year EPSRC Senior Research Fellowship, to support her research on the moduli spaces of complex algebraic curves.Prof. Frances Kirwan awarded an EPSRC Senior Research Fellowship (2004) , maths.ox.ac.uk; accessed 9 May 2014.
In 2017, she was elected Savilian Professor of Geometry, becoming the first woman to hold the post. While this entailed a move to New College, Oxford, she was elected an emeritus fellow at Balliol. She was the convenor of the 2008–2009 meeting of European Women in Mathematics and deputy convenor of the following meeting in 2010–2011.
Personal life Kirwan is the mother of Geoff Penington, a physics professor at UC Berkeley. She was married to Michael Penington, an investment banker and the son of David Penington.
Prizes, awards and scholarships London Mathematical Society Whitehead Prize, 1989Dr Frances Kirwan awarded the Whitehead Prize, lms.ac.uk; accessed 9 May 2014. Fellow of the Royal Society, 2001Profile, royalsociety.org; accessed 9 May 2014. President, London Mathematical Society, 2003–2005 EPSRC Senior Research Fellowship, 2005–2010, for her work in algebraic geometryProf. Frances Kirwan awarded an EPSRC Senior Research Fellowship, Univ. of Oxford Mathematical Inst., retrieved 20 October 2014. Fellow of the American Mathematical Society, 2012List of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society; accessed 9 May 2014 London Mathematical Society Senior Whitehead Prize, 2013 DBE for services to mathematics, 2014 Maths and Computing Suffrage Science award, 2016(registration required) Member of Academia Europaea Chairman of the United Kingdom Mathematics Trust Sylvester Medal of The Royal Society, 2021 Honorary degree, University of York, 2020 Honorary degree, University of St Andrews, 2022 L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Awards (Laureate for Europe – Mathematics), 2023 Honorary degree, University of Warwick, 2026
Kirwan served on the medal-selection committee that awarded the Fields medal to Maryam Mirzakhani.
Publications
with Jonathan Woolf:
References
External links Profile at the University of Oxford Mathematical Institute