Education
Thompson graduated from Wellesley College in 1979, and earned her Doctor of Philosophy in 1986 from Rutgers University under the joint supervision of Martin Scharlemann and Julius L. Shaneson.
Thompson graduated from Wellesley College in 1979, and earned her Doctor of Philosophy in 1986 from Rutgers University under the joint supervision of Martin Scharlemann and Julius L. Shaneson.
She works as a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Davis, where she specializes in knot theory and low-dimensional topology. After visiting positions at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the University of California, Berkeley, she joined the University of California Davis faculty in 1988. In 2012, she became one of the inaugural fellows of the American Mathematical Society.
Thompson has also been an activist for reform of primary and secondary school mathematics education.
As an alternative, she founded a program at University of California Davis to improve teacher knowledge of mathematics, and became the director of the California State Summer School for Mathematics and Science, a month-long summer mathematics camp for high school students.