mathematician university professor
Kirwan was educated at Oxford High School, and studied maths as an undergraduate at Clare College in the University of Cambridge. She took a Doctorate.Phil at Oxford in 1984, with the dissertation title The Cohomology of Quotients in Symplectic and Algebraic Geometry, which was supervised by Michael Atiyah.
Her fields of specialisation are algebraic and symplectic geometry. Kirwan"s research interests include moduli spaces in algebraic geometry, geometric invariant theory (GIT), and in the link between GIT and moment maps in symplectic geometry. Her work endeavours to understand the structure of geometric objects by investigation of their algebraic and topological properties.
She introduced the Kirwan map.
From 1983-1985 she held a Junior Fellowship at Harvard. From 1983-1986 she held a Fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford, before later becoming a Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford.
She is an honorary fellow at Clare College, Cambridge. In 1996 she was appointed a University Professor of Mathematics.
From 2004-2006 she was President of the London Mathematical Society, the second-youngest president in the society"s history.
In 2005, she received a five-year Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council Senior Fellowship, to support her research on the moduli spaces of complex algebraic curves.
London Mathematical Society Whitehead Prize, 1989 Fellow of the Royal Society, 2001 President, London Mathematical Society, 2003-2005 Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council Senior Fellowship, 2005-2010, for her work in algebraic geometry Fellow of the American Mathematical Society, 2012 London Mathematical Society Senior Whitehead Prize, 2013 Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire for services to mathematics, 2014 Member of Academia Europaea Chairman of the United Kingdom Mathematics Trust.
Publications Cohomology of Quotients in Symplectic and Algebraic Geometry. Mathematical Notes 31. Princeton University Press.
1984. . An Introduction to Intersection Homology Theory. Longman Scientific and Technical. 1988. with Jonathan Woolf: 2nd edn.
CRC Press. 2006. . Complex Algebraic Curves. London Mathematical Society Student Texts. Cambridge University Press.
Royal Society; Academia Europaea. American Mathematical Society]
Member of Academia Europaea.
