On Tuesday, the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters announced it has awarded this year’s Abel Prize — an award modeled on the Nobel Prizes — to Karen Uhlenbeck, an emeritus professor at the University of Texas at Austin. The award cites “the fundamental impact of her work on analysis, geometry and mathematical physics.”
One of Uhlenbeck’s advances in essence described the complex shapes of soap films not in a bubble bath but in abstract, high-dimensional curved spaces. In later work, she helped put a rigorous mathematical underpinning to techniques widely used by physicists in quantum field theory to describe fundamental interactions between particles and forces.
In the process, she helped pioneer a field known as geometric analysis, and she developed techniques now commonly used by many mathematicians.
“She did things nobody thought about doing,” said Sun-Yung Alice Chang, a mathematician at Princeton University who served on the five-member prize committee, “and after she did, she laid the foundations of a branch of mathematics.”
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Uhlenbeck, 76, a visiting associate at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, said she had not decided what to do with the $700,000 that accompanies the honor.
The Abel is named after Norwegian mathematician Niels Hendrik Abel. Since 2003, it has been given out annually to highlight important advances in mathematics. The previous 19 laureates — in three years, the prize was split between two mathematicians — were men.
In 1983, Uhlenbeck received broad recognition with a MacArthur Fellowship, which comes with a bundle of money — $204,000 in Uhlenbeck’s case.
In 1990, she became the second woman to give one of the highlighted plenary talks at the International Congress of Mathematicians, a quadrennial meeting. At each congress, there are 10 to 20 plenary talks, but for decades, all of the speakers had been men.
Uhlenbeck said she recognized that she was a role model for women who followed her in mathematics.
“Looking back now I realize that I was very lucky,” she said. “I was in the forefront of a generation of women who actually could get real jobs in academia.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.