Prof. Lisa Jeffrey of the U of T Scarborough has been named to the Royal Society, the country’s oldest and most prestigious scholarly organization.
Jeffrey, a professor in the Department of Computer and Mathematical Sciences, is among 12 faculty members from the University of Toronto to be elected Fellows of the Royal Society this year. She is believed to be only the second woman from this campus to be elected, after Prof. Janice Boddy, who is now Chair of Anthropology on the St. George campus.
Founded in 1882, the Royal Society aims to promote learning and research in the arts and sciences. Members are selected by their peers for outstanding contributions to their fields. The 78 new Fellows elected from across Canada this month will be inducted during a ceremony to be held in Ottawa in November.
“Membership in the Royal Society honours the culmination of years of internationally recognized research, and is proof positive of exceptional academic success,” said Prof. Ragnar-Olaf Buchweitz, Vice-Principal (Academic) and Dean. “Prof. Lisa Jeffrey has continued to make a name for herself in the field of mathematics, and more particularly in the area of symplectic geometry. On behalf of the entire campus community -- and as a fellow mathematician – I wish to congratulate Prof. Jeffrey on this richly deserved honour.”
“The Royal Society fellowship is just one in a series of her accomplishments,” Buchweitz added. “Her work enhances both mathematics and theoretical physics, especially as it pertains to quantum field theory and string theory, the true frontiers of abstract thought.”
Jeffrey earned her undergraduate degree in physics from Princeton University and her Master’s and DPhil (equivalent to a PhD) in mathematics from Cambridge and Oxford respectively. Joining the campus in 1998, she is renowned in the field of symplectic geometry, a physics-linked area of mathematics.
Jeffrey said the appeal of math is that “although my research may be superseded by or subsumed in the discoveries of later researchers, once it has been established to be correct, it will not be proven wrong by later work.”
The Royal Society’s citation notes that Jeffrey has “made fundamental contributions to symplectic geometry, moduli spaces and mathematical physics. Her groundbreaking work with Frances Kirwan led to their celebrated proof of the Witten formulas for stable vector bundles, a landmark achievement in the theory of moduli spaces; their techniques are now standard tools in symplectic geometry and other areas of mathematics and physics. The interdisciplinary nature of Jeffrey’s work has an enormous value to both mathematics and theoretical physics, and especially to quantum field theory and string theory.”
While at Princeton, Jeffrey worked with another female mathematician, Frances Kirwan. They built the mathematical foundation and provided proofs for the brilliant ideas of Dr. Edward Witten, a renowned researcher at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study with expertise in string theory, which picks up where Einstein left off in his search for the so-called general unified theory, which aims to unite all the forces of nature. String theory seeks to reconcile Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which explains the large-scale properties of the universe, with quantum mechanics, which explains the behaviour of matter at the atomic and subatomic level. Currently, the two theories are incompatible, and string theory may be able to solve the incompatibility issue, which is why string theory is sometimes described as “the theory of everything” and excites physicists worldwide.
“A central theme of Lisa Jeffrey’s research is to provide rigorous mathematical justification to results which have been predicted by theoretical physicists, where these physical arguments do not yet have a meaningful mathematical interpretation,” said John Scherk, Chair of Computer and Mathematical Science. “One of her most quoted results, which was done jointly with Frances Kirwan and motivated by the work of Witten, is the 1995 Jeffrey-Kirwan Residue Formula. In 2001, she further applied these results to establish a formula for the quantization of moduli spaces of parabolic bundles, of the type predicted by the physicist Verlinde in the context of quantum field theory.”
Jeffrey’s research accomplishments have been recognized by the André Aisenstadt Prize, a Sloan Fellowship, a Premier’s Research Excellence Award, the McLean Award, the Krieger-Nelson Prize, the Coxeter-James Prize, and a Steacie Fellowship. She has been with U of T Scarborough since 1998, and currently supervises five PhD students.
In her contacts with many graduate and undergraduate students interested in pursuing a career in math, Jeffrey says she encourages students to “learn about the many careers outside of academia for which mathematics is a suitable preparation, as well as emphasizing the steps they should take to pursue a career within academia. In many countries, such as the U.K. where I did my own graduate work, a PhD is viewed as suitable preparation for a non-academic career.”
She adds other young women interested in pursuing math careers should “follow their instincts. I would make the point that in some subfields of mathematics, the number of women is fairly high. Academic life is more flexible than many other professions, so it is less incompatible with family life than many other career choices.”
Having mentors is crucial, Jeffrey said. “My chief mentors have been my supervisor, Michael Atiyah, my first postdoctoral supervisor, Edward Witten, and my co-author, Frances Kirwan, an earlier doctoral student of Michael Atiyah. Their mentoring was invaluable to me.”
Other current Royal Society Fellows at U of T Scarborough are: Prof. John Friedlander (Mathematics); Prof. Emeritus Allan Griffin (Physics), Prof. John Kennedy (Psychology); Prof. Michael Lambek (Anthropology); and Professor Emeritus Robert McClelland (Chemistry).
The other 11 University of Toronto professors named to the Royal Society this month are:
James Brown (Philosophy); Gary Crawford (Anthropology, U of T Mississauga); Eugenia Kumacheva (Chemistry); Kenneth Leithwood (OISE/UT); Peter Martin (Astronomy and Astrophysics); John Mylopoulos (Computer Science); Theodore Shepherd (Physics); Peter Singer (Bioethics); Barry Wellman (Sociology); and Paul Young (Civil Engineering).
by Mary Ann Gratton