Dusa McDuff

Dusa McDuff
Dusa McDuff, Edinburgh 2009 (80th Birthday of Michael Atiyah)
Born	Margaret Dusa Waddington (1945-10-18) 18 October 1945 (age 71) London, England
Residence	Stony Brook, New York
Nationality	British
Fields	Mathematics
Institutions	University of Cambridge University of York University of Warwick Massachusetts Institute of Technology Institute for Advanced Study Stony Brook University Barnard College
Alma mater	University of Edinburgh Girton College, Cambridge
Doctoral advisor	George A. Reid
Doctoral students	Katrin Wehrheim
Notable awards	BMS Morning Speaker Satter Prize (1991) Fellow of the Royal Society Speaker at International Congress of Mathematicians BMC Plenary Speaker

Dusa McDuff, FRS (born 18 October 1945) is an English mathematician who works on symplectic geometry. She has been awarded the first Satter Prize and become a Noether Lecturer and a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Margaret Dusa Waddington was born in London, England, on 18 October 1945 to biologist Conrad Hal Waddington and his second wife, Edinburgh architect Margaret Justin Blanco White. Her sister is the anthropologist Caroline Humphrey, and she has an elder half-brother C. Jake Waddington by her father's first marriage. Her mother was the daughter of Amber Reeves, the noted feminist and lover of H. G. Wells and an author in her own right. Though born in London, McDuff grew up in Scotland, where her father was appointed Professor of Genetics at the University of Edinburgh. McDuff was educated at St. George's School for Girls in Edinburgh and, although the standard was lower than at the corresponding boys' school, The Edinburgh Academy, McDuff had an exceptionally good mathematics teacher. She writes:

I always wanted to be a mathematician (apart from a time when I was eleven when I wanted to be a farmer's wife), and assumed that I would have a career, but I had no idea how to go about it: I didn't realize that the choices which one made about education were important and I had no idea that I might experience real difficulties and conflicts in reconciling the demands of a career with life as a woman.

Turning down a scholarship to the University of Cambridge to stay with her boyfriend in Scotland, she enrolled at the University of Edinburgh. Awarded a BSc in 1967, McDuff eventually matriculated as a doctoral student at the Girton College, Cambridge. Here, under the guidance of mathematician George A. Reid, McDuff worked on problems in functional analysis. She solved a problem on von Neumann algebras, constructing infinitely many different factors of type II₁, and published the work in the Annals of Mathematics.