Dusa McDuff

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Dusa McDuff (born Margaret Dusa Waddington in London on 18 October 1945) is an English mathematician whose first work was in the field of von Neumann algebras (notably, she proved the existence of infinitely many type II₁ factors). She has more recently made fundamental and wide-ranging contributions to symplectic geometry, especially in connection with Gromov's pseudoholomorphic curves.

Dusa McDuff was born in London as the daughter of the noted biologist Conrad Hal Waddington. Her mother, Justin, was an architect, while her maternal grandmother was the feminist Amber Reeves, a close friend of H.G. Wells and an author in her own right. McDuff's early education was at Edinburgh. After graduating from the University of Edinburgh, she went on to University of Cambridge, and after that taught at York University and University of Warwick. She moved to the United States and since has taught at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Her husband is Fields medalist John Milnor, another mathematician at Stony Brook. McDuff is a Fellow of the Royal Society (1994), a Noether Lecturer (1998) and a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences (1999). With Dietmar Salamon, she co-authored the standard textbooks Introduction to Symplectic Topology and J-Holomorphic Curves and Symplectic Topology.