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Nancy Hingston

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Nancy Hingston
NationalityAmerican
Alma materHarvard University
Known forGeneric existence of infinitely many closed geodesics
Proof of the Conley conjecture
Scientific career
FieldsMathematics
Doctoral advisorRaoul Bott

Nancy Burgess Hingston is a mathematician working in algebraic topology and differential geometry. She is a professor emerita of mathematics at The College of New Jersey.[1]

Early life and education[edit]

Nancy Hingston's father William Hingston was superintendent of the Central Bucks School District in Pennsylvania; her mother was a high school mathematics and computer science teacher.[2] She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a double major in mathematics and physics. After a year studying physics as a graduate student, she switched to mathematics,[1] and completed her PhD in 1981 from Harvard University under the supervision of Raoul Bott.[3]

Career[edit]

Before joining TCNJ, she taught at the University of Pennsylvania.[2] She has also been a frequent visitor to the Institute for Advanced Study,[1] and has been involved with the Program for Women and Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study since its founding in 1994.[4]

Contributions[edit]

Nancy Hingston made major contributions in Riemannian geometry and Hamiltonian dynamics, and more specifically in the study of closed geodesics and, more generally, periodic orbits of Hamiltonian systems. In her very first paper,[5] she proved that a generic Riemannian metric on a closed manifold possesses infinitely many closed geodesics. In the 1990s, she proved that the growth rate of closed geodesics in Riemannian 2-spheres is at least the one of prime numbers.[6] In the years 2000s, she proved the long-standing Conley conjecture from symplectic geometry: every Hamiltonian diffeomorphism of a standard symplectic torus of any even dimension possesses infinitely many periodic points[7] (the result was subsequently extended by Viktor Ginzburg to more general symplectic manifolds).

Recognition[edit]

Nancy Hingston was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2014.[8][9][10]

She is a fellow of the American Mathematical Society, for "contributions to differential geometry and the study of closed geodesics."[11]

Personal[edit]

Her husband, Jovi Tenev, is a lawyer.[2] She has three children.[9]

References[edit]

  1. ^ Jump up to: a b c "Dr. Nancy Hingston", Women in Science: Profiles of Selected TCNJ Women Faculty and Alumni, School of Science, The College of New Jersey, retrieved 2015-10-25.
  2. ^ Jump up to: a b c "Jovi Tenev Weds Nancy Hingston", Style, The New York Times, August 23, 1981.
  3. ^ Nancy Hingston at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  4. ^ Plump, Wendy (May 29, 2012), "Mentoring young women is integral to institute's math program", Times of Trenton.
  5. ^ Hingston, Nancy (1984), "Equivariant Morse theory and closed geodesics", Journal of Differential Geometry, 19 (1): 85–116, doi:10.4310/jdg/1214438424
  6. ^ Hingston, Nancy (1993), "On the growth of the number of closed geodesics on the two-sphere", International Mathematics Research Notices, 1993 (9): 253–262, doi:10.1155/S1073792893000285
  7. ^ Hingston, Nancy (2009), "Subharmonic solutions of Hamiltonian equations on tori", Annals of Mathematics, 170 (2): 529–560, doi:10.4007/annals.2009.170.529
  8. ^ ICM Plenary and Invited Speakers since 1897, International Mathematical Union, retrieved 2015-10-01.
  9. ^ Jump up to: a b Patterson, Mary Jo (May 26, 2014), "On Stage in Seoul", TCJN News, The College of New Jersey, retrieved 2015-10-25.
  10. ^ Hingston, Nancy. "Loop products, Poincaré duality, index growth and dynamics". Proceedings of the ICM, Seoul 2014. Vol. 2. pp. 881–896.
  11. ^ 2017 Class of the Fellows of the AMS, American Mathematical Society, retrieved 2016-11-06.
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