Pauline Sperry Undergraduate Lectures
In celebration of the anniversary of the addition of the first woman to become an associate professor in the Berkeley Math Department and her incredible devotion to the math community at Berkeley.
109th Anniversary Talk
Kathryn Mann (Department of Mathematics, Cornell University)
March 17th
Associate Professor of Mathematics and Rosevear Faculty Leadership Fellow at Cornell University
This talk will introduce you to the notion of a linearly ordered (also known as left-ordered or right-ordered...) group. While this might seem like a purely algebraic idea (groups!), orders have a long history and very interesting connections to other fields of mathematics. I'll describe some fun examples and interesting theorems, and hope to give you a taste of how these objects interact with my research. This talk should be accessible to everyone, it will be helpful if you know what a group is, but that is not strictly required. If you can add vectors in R^2, and compose real-valued functions, you are already equipped to learn about some exciting open problems.
Biography of Katherine Mann
Kathryn Mann is a Professor of Mathematics at Cornell University and a CNRS Researcher at Sorbonne University of Paris. She is one of the leading figures at the interface of low-dimensional topology, geometry, and dynamics. Her work explores how algebraic objects—such as groups arising from topology or dynamics—act on manifolds, and how these actions encode deep geometric and topological information.
After doing her undergraduate in Toronto, Kathryn received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, was a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley, and a professor at Brown before joining Cornell in 2019. Recently she obtained a position of Directrice de Recherche at the French CNRS. She has received several honors for her research, including a Sloan Research Fellowship, and has delivered invited lectures at major international conferences, including the International Congress of Mathematicians.
Currently, Kathryn is one of the organizers of the thematic program “Topological and Geometric Methods in Low Dimensions” at SLMath, which brings together researchers working across topology, geometry, and dynamics. She is also very interested in issues relating communicating mathematics to diverse audiences, and has been active in a number of directed reading projects and organizing professional development seminars around good communication.
Biography of Pauline Sperry
The year 2017 marked the centennial of the addition of the first woman to become an associate professor in the Berkeley Math Department – Pauline Sperry. Born in 1885 in Massachusetts, she studied math and music at Smith College, where she later returned for graduate work and teaching mathematics. She continued her graduate studies at the University of Chicago, where she completed her dissertation in projective differential geometry and in 1916 was awarded a doctorate. Then in 1917, she joined UC Berkeley as an instructor, promoted to assistant professor in 1923 and eventually to associate professor in 1932, both demonstrating her brilliance in advanced mathematics as the first woman to achieve those positions in Berkeley. By 1950, she had advised five Ph.D. candidates, published a bibliography and two textbooks, and mentored many women in her decades of service to the Berkeley Math Department.
Sperry’s distinguished career came to a premature end in 1950 when she was dismissed for refusing to sign an oath of loyalty at the height of the anti-communist era. She believed as a matter of principle that the oath would encroach on political freedom. After 2 years, the court ruled in her and other nonsigners favor, but as she was already passed the retirement age, she was reinstated as associate professor emerita. Later, the University President Robert G. Sproul praised her “exceptional ability as a teacher in a subject in which the quality of teaching can be responsible in large measure for the difference between brilliance and mediocrity in a student's work.”
After retiring from teaching, Sperry dedicated her time to promote human rights through involvement in the American Civil Liberties Union, the League of Women Voters, and the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy. A remarkable philanthropist, she also gave to help those in need, claiming that to be happy, one should be “bold enough to ask the right questions, and brave enough to face the answers about the untouchable subject, money. ... Give 'till it hurts!”.
It is in honor of Professor Sperry’s decades of devotion to teaching, excellence in mathematics, social activism, and her remarkable generosity and spirit that we started this lecture series. Our hope is that her example can serve as a role model for all students of mathematics.
You can find a link to (some of) our previous years' lectures here