Stephanie B. Alexander
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Stephanie Brewster Brewer Taylor Alexander (September 1, 1941 – November 20, 2023)[1] was an American mathematician, a professor of mathematics at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.[2] Her research concerned differential geometry and metric spaces.[3]
Alexander was born in Los Angeles and raised in Vancouver, British Columbia, and London, Ontario. She was a graduate of Mount Holyoke College.[4]
She earned her Ph.D. from UIUC in 1967, under the supervision of Richard L. Bishop, with a thesis entitled Reducibility of Euclidean Immersions of Low Codimensions.[5] After joining the UIUC faculty as a half-time instructor, she became a regular faculty member in 1972.[3] She retired in 2009[6] and died in 2023.[4]
Mathematical Work
Alexander's most significant achievements were in relation to the study of metric spaces with curvature bounds. Of particular importance was her work with Bishop to establish a concept of curvature bounds in the style of Alexandrov geometry for semi-Riemannian manifolds and Lorentzian manifolds, an early step towards the development of synthetic geometry in a Lorentzian setting.[7]
Books
- With Vitali Kapovitch and Anton Petrunin, Alexander authored the book An Invitation to Alexandrov Geometry: CAT(0) Spaces (Springer, 2019).
- S. Alexander, V. Kapovitch, A. Petrunin. Alexandrov geometry—foundations. — AMS, 2024. — (Grad. Stud. Math. 236).
