Karen Uhlenbeck

Karen Uhlenbeck is an American mathematician, born in 1942 in Cleveland, Ohio, and one of the founders of modern geometric analysis. She received her bachelor's degree from the University of Michigan in 1964, then earned a master's degree in 1966 and a doctorate in 1968 at Brandeis University under the supervision of Richard Palais. She became a professor emerita of mathematics at the University of Texas at Austin, where she held the Sid W. Richardson Foundation Regents Chair, and later became a distinguished visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study and a visiting senior research scholar at Princeton University. In 2019 she won the Abel Prize for her work on geometric partial differential equations, gauge theory and integrable systems, becoming the first woman to receive it, and she donated half of the prize money to organizations that promote the engagement of women and other minorities in research mathematics.