Lisa Piccirillo

Piccirillo earned a B.S. in Mathematics from Boston College in 2013 and a PhD in low-dimensional topology at the University of Texas at Austin under the supervision of John Luecke in 2019, followed by postdoctoral research at Brandeis University.[2][3][4] Boston College professor Elisenda Grigsby cited Piccirillo's creativity as contributing to her success, adding that Piccirillo did not fit the mold of a "standard golden child math prodigy" during her undergraduate studies.[2]

The Conway Knot.

The Conway knot was a famous, long-standing unsolved problem in knot theory.[2][5] The knot was named after its discoverer, English mathematician John Horton Conway, who first wrote about the knot in 1970. The Conway knot was determined to be topologically slice in the 1980s; however the nature of its sliceness, and whether or not it was smoothly slice, eluded mathematicians for decades up until Piccirillo's breakthrough.[2] Piccirillo's work on the Conway knot completed the classification of slice knots with under thirteen crossings, as the Conway knot had been the last outstanding knot in its group fully unclassified.[1]

The Conway knot problem was notable not only for its age—remaining unsolved for over half a century—but also because the nature of the question itself regarding the sliceness of the Conway knot was "connected to some of the deepest questions in four-dimensional topology." According to Boston College mathematician Joshua Greene, the question of "whether the Conway knot is slice, had been kind of a touchstone for a lot of the modern developments around the general area of knot theory."[2]

Piccirillo first learned of the Conway knot problem in 2018 at a conference on low-dimensional topology and geometry.[2][6] She was a graduate student at the time and spent less than a week working on the knot in her free time before finding an answer.[5] The Washington Post reported that her proof had been "hailed as a thing of mathematical beauty, and her work could point to new ways to understand knots."[5] Following the publication of Piccirillo's proof in Annals of Mathematics, she was offered a tenure-track position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology set to begin fourteen months after the completion of her doctorate.[2][7]

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