Mary Rees

Susan Mary Rees, FRS (born Cambridge, 31 July 1953[1]) is a British mathematician and a Professor of Mathematics at Liverpool University since 2002, specialising in research in complex dynamical systems.[2][3]

After obtaining her BA in 1974 and MSc in 1975 at St Hugh's College, Oxford, she did research in mathematics under the direction of Bill Parry at Warwick University, obtaining a PhD in 1978. She was awarded a Whitehead Prize of the London Mathematical Society in 1988. The citation[4]notes that, in particular,

Her most spectacular theorem[5] has been to show that in the space of rational maps of the Riemann sphere of degree d ≥ 2 those maps that are ergodic with respect to Lebesgue measure and leave invariant an absolutely continuous probability measure form a set of positive measure.

In recent years, much of Prof Rees's work has focused on the dynamics of quadratic rational maps; i.e. rational maps of the Riemann sphere of degree two, including an extensive monograph.[6] In 2004, she also presented an alternative proof of the Ending Laminations Conjecture of Thurston,[7] which had been proved by Brock, Canary and Minsky shortly before.[8]

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FRS

She was elected to a Fellowship of the Royal Society in 2002.

Family

Her father David Rees is also a distinguished mathematician, who worked on Enigma in Hut 6 at Bletchley Park.

Works

References

  1. ^ GRO Register of Births: SEP 1953 4a 294 CAMBRIDGE – Susan M. Rees, mmn = Cushen
  2. ^ Mary Rees profile, University of Liverpool
  3. ^ http://www.liv.ac.uk/~maryrees/maryrees.homepage.html
  4. ^ Bulletin of the London Mathematical Society 20 (1988), no. 6, p. 639.
  5. ^ Positive measure sets of ergodic rational maps, Ann. Sci. École Norm. Sup. 19 (1986), no. 3, 383–407.
  6. ^ Views of parameter space: Topographer and resident, Asterisque 288 (2003)
  7. ^ The Ending Laminations Theorem direct from Teichmüller geodesics, Preprint, 2004
  8. ^ The classification of Kleinian surface groups, II: The Ending Lamination Conjecture, Prperint, 2004