Abigail Thompson

Abigail Thompson, 1987

Abigail A. Thompson (born in 1958, in Norwalk, Connecticut)[1] is an American mathematician. She works as a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Davis, where she specializes in knot theory and low-dimensional topology.[2]

Education and career

Thompson graduated from Wellesley College in 1979,[1] and earned her Ph.D. in 1986 from Rutgers University under the joint supervision of Martin Scharlemann and Julius L. Shaneson.[3] After visiting positions at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the University of California, Berkeley, she joined the UC Davis faculty in 1988.[1] Thompson had a postdoctoral fellowship with the National Science Foundation from 1988 to 1991 and a Sloan Foundation Fellowship from 1991 to 1993.[4] She was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in 1990-91 and 2000-01.[5]

Research

Thompson extended David Gabai's concept of thin position from knots to 3-manifolds and Heegaard splittings.[1]

Education reform

Thompson has also been an activist for reform of primary and secondary school mathematics education. She has publicly attacked the Mathland-based curriculum in use in the mid-1990s when the oldest of her three children began studying mathematics in school, claiming that it provided an inadequate foundation in basic mathematical skills, left no opportunity for independent work, and was based on poorly written materials. As an alternative, she founded a program at UC Davis to improve teacher knowledge of mathematics, and became the director of the California State Summer School for Mathematics and Science, a month-long summer mathematics camp for high school students.[6]

Recognition

Thompson won the 2003 Ruth Lyttle Satter Prize in Mathematics for her research on thin position and Heegard splittings.[1] In 2012, she became one of the inaugural fellows of the American Mathematical Society.[7]

Selected publications

Research papers
  • Scharlemann, Martin; Thompson, Abigail (1994), "Thin position for 3-manifolds", Geometric topology (Haifa, 1992), Contemp. Math., 164, Amer. Math. Soc., Providence, RI, pp. 231–238, doi:10.1090/conm/164/01596, MR 1282766 .
  • Scharlemann, Martin; Thompson, Abigail (1994), "Thin position and Heegaard splittings of the 3-sphere", Journal of Differential Geometry, 39 (2): 343–357, MR 1267894 .
  • Thompson, Abigail (1994), "Thin position and the recognition problem for S3", Mathematical Research Letters, 1 (5): 613–630, doi:10.4310/MRL.1994.v1.n5.a9, MR 1295555 .
  • Thompson, Abigail (1997), "Thin position and bridge number for knots in the 3-sphere", Topology, 36 (2): 505–507, doi:10.1016/0040-9383(96)00010-9, MR 1415602 .
Books
  • Adams, Colin; Hass, Joel; Thompson, Abigail (1998), How to Ace Calculus: The Streetwise Guide, New York: W.H. Freeman and Company, ISBN 0-7167-3160-6 .[8]
  • Adams, Colin; Hass, Joel; Thompson, Abigail (2001), How to Ace the Rest of Calculus: The Streetwise Guide, New York: W.H. Freeman and Company, ISBN 0-7167-4174-1 .[9]

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 "2003 Satter Prize" (PDF), Notices of the AMS, 50 (4): 474–475, April 2003 .
  2. ↑ Faculty profile, UC Davis, retrieved 2014-12-25.
  3. ↑ Abigail Thompson at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  4. ↑ "Abigail Thompson". www.agnesscott.edu. Retrieved 2018-10-06.
  5. ↑ "Abigail Thompson". www.agnesscott.edu. Retrieved 2018-10-06.
  6. ↑ O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Abigail A Thompson", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews .
  7. ↑ List of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society, retrieved 2014-12-25.
  8. ↑ Benson, Steve (December 12, 1998), "Review of How to Ace Calculus", MAA Reviews, Mathematical Association of America
  9. ↑ Anderson, Kevin (December 12, 2002), "Review of How to Ace the Rest of Calculus", MAA Reviews, Mathematical Association of America
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