Lillian Pierce
Lillian Beatrix Pierce is a mathematician whose research connects number theory with harmonic analysis.[1] She is a professor of mathematics at Duke University.[2]
Early life and education
[edit | edit source]Pierce was home-schooled in Fallbrook, California[1][3][4] and began playing the violin at age four.[5] By age 11 she began performing professionally as a violinist.[1] As a teenager, she also started taking classes at a local community college, accumulating so many units that some of the universities she applied to refused to consider her for freshman admission.[5] She entered Princeton University majoring in mathematics but intending to pursue an MD–PhD program;[6] under the influence of faculty mentor and undergraduate thesis supervisor Elias M. Stein, her interests shifted towards pure mathematics.[1][6][3] As an undergraduate, she also became an intern at the National Security Agency.[1] She was Princeton's 2002 valedictorian and became a Rhodes Scholar, repeating two accomplishments of her brother Niles Pierce from nine years earlier.[3]
She earned a master's degree at the University of Oxford in 2004.[2][1] Returning to Princeton for doctoral study in mathematics, she completed her Ph.D. in 2009. Her dissertation, Discrete Analogues in Harmonic Analysis, was supervised by Stein.[2][7]
Career
[edit | edit source]After postdoctoral studies with Roger Heath-Brown at Oxford and at the Hausdorff Center for Mathematics in Bonn, Germany, she became an assistant professor at Duke in 2014 and is now a full professor.[2][1]
Research
[edit | edit source]Pierce was one of the first mathematicians to prove nontrivial upper bounds on the number of elements of finite order in an ideal class group.[8]
Awards and honors
[edit | edit source]Pierce won the 2018 Sadosky Prize for research that "spans and connects a broad spectrum of problems ranging from character sums in number theory to singular integral operators in Euclidean spaces" including in particular "a polynomial Carleson theorem for manifolds".[9] She received the 2019 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers.[10] She was elected a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society in the class of 2021 "for contributions to number theory and harmonic analysis".[11] The Association for Women in Mathematics named her to their 2025 Class of AWM Fellows.[12]
Personal life
[edit | edit source]Her husband, Tobias Overath, also works at Duke as a neuroscientist.[1]
References
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- ^ Lillian Pierce at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
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Further reading
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External links
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- Living people
- 21st-century American mathematicians
- American women violinists
- Princeton University alumni
- American Rhodes Scholars
- Alumni of the University of Oxford
- Duke University faculty
- 21st-century American women mathematicians
- 21st-century American violinists
- 21st-century American women musicians
- Fellows of the American Mathematical Society
- Fellows of the Association for Women in Mathematics
- Recipients of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers