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Interview with Abel Laureate Karen Uhlenbeck Bjørn Ian Dundas and Christian Skau

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Interview with Abel Laureate Karen Uhlenbeck Bjørn Ian Dundas and Christian Skau COMMUNICATION Interview with Abel Laureate Karen Uhlenbeck Bjørn Ian Dundas and Christian Skau Karen Uhlenbeck is the recipient of the 2019 Abel Prize of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.1 The follow- ing interview originally appeared in the September 2019 issue of the Newsletter of the European Mathematical Society2 and is reprinted here with permission of the EMS. Dundas and Skau: Professor Uhlenbeck, firstly we want to congratulate you on being awarded the Abel Prize 2019 for your pioneering achievements in geometric partial differential equations, gauge theory and integrable systems, and for the fundamental impact of your work in analysis, geometry and mathematical physics. You will receive the prize tomorrow from His Majesty the King of Norway. Uhlenbeck: I’m greatly honoured, thank you! Dundas and Skau: You spent your childhood in New Jersey, and you described yourself both as a tomboy and as a reader. That sounds contradictory, but perhaps it isn’t? Uhlenbeck: I don’t believe it is exactly. I think now you would just say that I was interested in sports and the out- doors—“tomboy” is an old-fashioned word—and also, everyone in my family read, so our favourite time during the week was our trip to the library. Figure 1. Karen Uhlenbeck, the Abel Prize Laureate 2019. Dundas and Skau: Your mother was an artist, and your father Bjørn Ian Dundas is a professor of mathematics at the University of Bergen, was an engineer? Norway. His email address is [email protected]. Christian Skau is a professor emeritus of mathematics at the Norwegian Uhlenbeck: Yes. University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway. His email address is [email protected]. Dundas and Skau: Were there strong expectations as to what 1See the June–July 2019 Notices, https://www.ams.org/journals /notices/201906/rnoti-p939.pdf. you and your siblings were to do later in your lives? 2https://www.ems-ph.org/journals/newsletter/pdf/2019-09-113 .pdf#page=23. Uhlenbeck: Yes, there were strong expectations that we For permission to reprint this article, please contact: reprint-permission should be able to support ourselves. My parents married @ams.org. in the middle of the Great Depression, and the difficulties DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.1090/noti2049 with having enough money to live were very present to MARCH 2020 NOTICES OF THE AMERICAN MATHEMATICAL SOCIETY 393 COMMUNICATION them. So they were mostly concerned that we would ac- course in which I had an honours course in maths and an tually have jobs. And I think they had expectations of my honours course in physics and chemistry, and I just really brother actually getting an engineering degree, engineering took to the mathematics right from the very beginning. being a good profession. As with me they didn’t care so I enjoyed it and I was caught up in it, and I was actually much what I did. very good at it. And, you know, when you’re very good at a subject, you’re also encouraged to go on studying it. I really Dundas and Skau: You say that you were interested in every- enjoyed playing with the ideas. thing, but you also mentioned that Latin was the only hard course in high school. How did you then end up with mathematics? We Dundas and Skau: Did you have an aha moment, where you would have thought you would have chosen Latin then? sort of got enthralled by mathematics? You mentioned something about the derivative. Uhlenbeck: Well, I don’t really know myself! It was only lately I got the explanation for myself. But Latin was the Uhlenbeck: That’s right! The first time I really saw a de- only hard subject I had. It was not something you could rivative, it was actually not with a professor, but with a do right away, you really had to work at translating Latin. teaching assistant for the course, who was doing problem You know, to be in this tradition of years and years and sessions. We hadn’t got to taking derivatives in the class, years of knowledge, and actually be reading something but he showed us how to take a derivative, and he showed that was written so long ago was exciting even when I was us how to take a difference quotient and take a limit. And I a youngster. In my last year in high school I signed up still remember that I turned to my fellow student and said: for the honours maths course which was calculus. It con- “Are you allowed to do that?” I was very excited to be able flicted with the Latin course, so I signed up for something to do that. Also, I still remember when I was understanding like Spanish instead. However, after one or two classes in the proof of the Heine–Borel theorem. I just remember, you Spanish I changed my mind and I went back to Latin and know, arguing by using little boxes and things like that. And took the regular maths course, which did not conflict with I was very excited by the experience. the Latin course. Dundas and Skau: This was at the University of Michigan? Dundas and Skau: Then you enrolled at the university as a physics major? Uhlenbeck: Yes, I was a first year student there. Uhlenbeck: That’s right. I had been turned on to physics. Dundas and Skau: The experience at Michigan you describe as My father was a very intellectual person even though it sort of special. I suppose you could have gone to other places, but had nothing to do with his job, and he got books out of you went to Michigan, and did that turn out to be a good choice? the library, and I remember particular books written by Fred Hoyle. I read all those books and I think he also read Uhlenbeck: Yes, it turned out to be a very good choice. Well, them. I have to confess that I didn’t do all the mathemat- they had this honours programme. I also met the right ics in them, but I saw all the mathematics in them. I also people and the right things happened to me. In my first remember books by George Gamow that I found in the year at the University of Michigan I earned pocket money library. There weren’t many books on maths and science in by waitressing in the dining hall. I lived in New Jersey so I the library at all, so my resources were somewhat limited, didn’t go home for the break, and I was around. During one but I was fascinated by the physics. Of course, I didn’t even of the breaks I was in an art museum. Well, my mother was know that you could be a mathematician, so I enrolled as an artist and I had essentially been going to art museums a physics major. since I was in the womb; anyway, I was in the art museum, and I bumped into a professor next to me, and it turned out Dundas and Skau: So you had some experience with mathe- that he was a maths professor. His name was Dan Hughes. matics when you started at the university? He found out who I was and what I did and the first thing I knew—I think it was the next semester, it might have been Uhlenbeck: Right. I tell the story all the time, this was my second semester, I can’t remember when it was—but three years after the Sputnik3 went up, and so there were the first thing I knew was that I was grading linear algebra programmes all over the country in integrated maths and without having ever taken it! So I was just taken in and, science, encouraging students to study maths and science. you know, I didn’t think about it as anything special. To So there were honours courses in maths. I took a unified me I was just somebody who didn’t know what was going on and wanted to learn things. But I think I got very good 3The first artificial satellite, launched on the 4th of October 1957 by the treatment by my maths professors. Soviet Union. 394 NOTICES OF THE AMERICAN MATHEMATICAL SOCIETY VOLUME 67, NUMBER 3 COMMUNICATION Dundas and Skau: So you were actually seen and you were University) had a very special record for women. Lipman recognized? Bers had been there and had trained a whole generation of women students. So NYU had a very good reputation to- Uhlenbeck: Yes. In fact, I think I took my first graduate wards women. Brandeis hadn’t much of a reputation at all. course when I was a sophomore. I took the graduate course I had an NSF-postdoc and I probably would have got into in algebra and I remember we did the Wedderburn lemmas. MIT and Harvard, but some inner radar said not to do that. I remember that I didn’t understand the course, but three years later when I did come to study for the preliminary Dundas and Skau: You chose Richard Palais as your thesis exams I looked at the material, and I could actually pull it advisor. Can you tell us why you chose him, and what the theme up and understand it. It’s amazing what your brain actually of your thesis was? does—learning is not linear at all. Anyway, I was already in advanced maths classes as a sophomore. Then I spent Uhlenbeck: I took a course from him in my first year there.
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