Krystyna M. Kuperberg is a Polish-American mathematician who currently works as a professor of mathematics at Auburn University and is the former Alumni Professor of Mathematics there.
Education
After attending high school in Gdańsk, she entered the University of Warsaw in 1962, where she studied mathematics. Her first mathematics course was taught by Andrzej Mostowski. Later she attended topology lectures of Karol Borsuk and became fascinated by topology.
Career
Her parents, January West. and Barbara H. Trybulec, were pharmacists and owned a pharmacy in TarnóWest Her older brother is Andrzej Trybulec. After obtaining her undergraduate degree, Kuperberg began graduate studies at Warsaw under Borsuk, but stopped after earning a masters" degree.
She left Poland in 1969 with her family to live in Sweden, then moved to the United States in 1972.
She finished her Doctor of Philosophy in 1974, from Rice University, under the supervision of William Jaco. In 1987 she solved a problem of Knaster concerning bi-homogeneity of continua.
In the 1980s she became interested in fixed points and topological aspects of dynamical systems In 1989 Kuperberg and Coke Reed solved a problem posed by Stan Ulam in the Scottish Book.
The solution to that problem led to her well known 1993 work in which she constructed a smooth counterexample to the Seifert conjecture.
She has since continued to work in dynamical systems Her major lectures include an American Mathematical Society Plenary Lecture in March 1995, an MAA Plenary Lecture in January 1996, and an ICM invited talk in 1998. In 2012 she became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
Membership
American Mathematical Society.