US Mathematician Is First Woman to Win Prestigious Abel Prize Karen Keskulla Uhlenbeck Built Bridges Between Analysis, Geometry and Physics

IN FOCUS NEWS

The WireWall frame is moving. So Brown splashes up in a sideways squirt that can be measures waves got in touch with hard for WireWall to detect. sloshing over sea walls. Margaret Yelland, an oceanographer at RISING TIDE the NOC site in Southampton, who has used Eventually, the researchers aim to use the data to capacitance wires, which sense contact with salt help improve oceanographic models and other water, on buoys in the open ocean (R. W. Pascal tools, such as the European-led industry guide et al. J. Atmos. Ocean. Technol. 28, 590-605; on overtopping known as EurOtop. Brown has 2011). Working with Pullen and others, they already spoken to officials about taking Wire- designed and tested WireWall before taking it Wall elsewhere. One option is the Fylde pen- to Crosby, where local officials plan to replace insula in Lancashire, UK, where three new sea the ageing sea wall and are looking for infor- walls each have a slightly different design on mation on how best to do that. (Part of their which WireWall could compare sloshing. research involved going through photos from a “We’d like to be able to go anywhere,” says Facebook group of people who walk on Crosby Brown. In Australia, ecologists Rebecca Morris beach to see how often the car park flooded.) and Beth Strain of the University of Melbourne When tides are high, winds are strong and it plan to use WireWall to compare flooding that looks as if the sea might break over the wall at breaches sea walls with flooding over natural Crosby, the WireWall team sets up its rig. It’s coastal defences such as mangrove forests. In about the height of a person and has 18 wires Norway, researchers might use WireWall to arrayed in a grid. When seawater hits the wires, study how winds blowing across reservoirs can it generates an electrical contact that reveals push water over the tops of dams and destabi- how much of the wire is wet. By measuring lize them, says Fjóla Guðrún Sigtryggsdóttir, a how the wires get drenched as the wave passes civil engineer at the Norwegian University of through them, the researchers can calculate the Science and Technology in Trondheim. over the wall and, by measuring the depth of water’s speed and volume. WireWall could become even more relevant water after each slop, the scientists could take “We’ve had a good range of lovely big waves as sea levels continue to rise, increasing the some of the only such field measurements coming over,” says Yelland, who has been risk of waves breaching walls. In the United captured so far (T. Pullen et al. Coast. Eng. 56, looking through the data gathered at high Kingdom, coastal planners are required to take 121–140; 2009). tides in October, November and January. the effects of sea-level rise into account when But tanks are heavy and expensive to deploy, One unexpected factor is that when the waves building new sea defences. At Crosby, sea level and they don’t gather data on how fast water arrive nearly parallel to the sea wall, the water is rising by 1.6 millimetres per year. ■

AWARDS US mathematician is first woman to win prestigious Abel Prize Karen Keskulla Uhlenbeck built bridges between analysis, geometry and physics.

BY DAVIDE CASTELVECCHI at the heart of most physical laws. But her long of gauge fields, a generalization of the theory of career has stretched across many fields, and classical electromagnetic fields that underlies S mathematician Karen Keskulla she has used the equations to solve problems the standard model of particle physics. Uhlenbeck has won the 2019 Abel in geometry and topology. Prize — one of mathematics’ most One of her most influential results — and DISPARATE FIELDS Uprestigious awards — for her wide-ranging the one that she says she’s most proud of — Much of Uhlenbeck’s work was done in the work in analysis, geometry and mathemati- is the discovery of a phenomenon called early 1980s, when research communities that cal physics. Uhlenbeck is the first woman bubbling, as part of seminal work she did with had grown apart were starting to connect again, to win the 6-million-kroner (US$700,000) mathematician Jonathan Sacks. Sacks and she recalls. “There was a real flowering of this prize, which is given out by the Norwegian Uhlenbeck were studying ‘minimal surfaces’, relationship between mathematics and physics,” Academy of Science and Letters, since it was the mathematical theory of how soap films she says. Mathematicians proved that they had first awarded in 2003. arrange themselves into shapes that minimize information useful to physicists, who “had great Uhlenbeck learnt that she had won on their energy. But the theory had been marred ideas of objects to study that mathematicians 17 March, after a friend called and told her that by the appearance of points at which energy couldn’t come up with by themselves”. the academy was trying to contact her. “I was seemed to become infinitely concentrated. The work of other prizewinning mathemati- completely amazed,” she told Nature. “It was Uhlenbeck ‘zoomed in’ on those points to show cians has been rooted in techniques introduced totally out of the blue.” that this was caused by a new bubble splitting by Uhlenbeck, says Mark Haskins, a mathemati- Uhlenbeck is legendary for her skill with off the surface. cian at the University of Bath, UK, who was one partial differential equations, which link varia- She applied similar techniques to do of her doctoral students. These include Fields ble quantities and their rates of change, and are foundational work in the mathematical theory Medal winner Simon Donaldson — who

NEWS IN FOCUS

applied gauge theory to the topology of four- women,” says Caroline Series, a mathematician dimensional spaces — and 2009 Abel laureate at the University of Warwick in Coventry, UK, Mikhail Gromov, who studied a mathemati- and president of the London Mathematical cal analogue of the ‘strings’ of string theory, in Society. In 1990, she gave a plenary speech at which the bubbling idea was crucial. the International Congress of Mathematicians ANDREA KANE/IAS Haskins says Uhlenbeck has “an innate sense — the only woman to have done so apart from of what should be true”. As a student, he recalls algebra pioneer Emmy Noether, who spoke at sometimes being baffled by her answers to his the 1932 meeting. questions. “Your immediate reaction was that Uhlenbeck became a role model reluctantly Karen had misheard you, because she had at first, but she says that, after a few successes by answered a different question,” Haskins says. female mathematicians in her generation, she But “maybe weeks later, you would realize that realized that the path towards fair representa- you had not asked the correct question”. tion would be harder than expected. “We all thought that once the legal barriers were down, ‘LEGITIMATE REBELLION’ women and minorities would walk through Karen Keskulla was born in Cleveland, Ohio, the doors of academia and take their rightful in 1942, and grew up in part in New Jersey, place.” But fixing universities was easier than intensely interested in learning. “I read all of fixing the culture in which people grow up, says the books on science in the library and was Uhlenbeck. She hopes that her prize can inspire frustrated when there was nothing left to read,” Karen Keskulla Uhlenbeck. girls to go into maths, just as Noether and others she wrote in a 1996 autobiographical essay. inspired her. ■ After an initial interest in physics, she earned Uhlenbeck held positions at several her PhD in mathematics in 1968 from Brandeis universities before settling at the University of University in Waltham, Massachusetts. She Texas at Austin in 1987, where she stayed until CLARIFICATION was one of the few women in her department; she retired in 2014. The News Feature ‘What’s next for CRISPR some academics recognized her talent and Uhlenbeck has been a relentless advocate for babies?’ (Nature 566, 440–442; 2019) now encouraged her, but others did not. “We were women in mathematics, and was the founder includes a comment from Michael Deem’s told that we couldn’t do math because we were of the Women and Mathematics programme at lawyer, in which he says that Deem was not women,” she wrote in the 1996 essay. “I liked the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, a senior author on the human-gene-editing doing what I wasn’t supposed to do, it was a New Jersey. “She has been an enormous role paper describing He’s experiments. sort of legitimate rebellion.” model and mentor for many generations of

Free online course for peer reviewers For researchers new to peer review or wishing to develop their skills

Taught by Nature Research editors ● 2-3 hours’ learning ● Free completion certi cate

W masterclasses.nature.com Follow us on LinkedIn

A50987