Somerville alumna, Professor Caroline Series (Mathematics, 1969) was elected Fellow of the Royal Society on the 29th April 2016.
Series, who is a Professor of Mathematics at Warwick University, is one of the 50 new Fellows and 10 new Foreign Members announced by the Royal Society last month. Appointed annually, Royal Society Fellowships are awarded to the most eminent scientists, engineers and technologists from or living and working in the UK and Commonwealth. 13 of this year’s intake of FRS are women — up from last year’s intake of eight female Fellows
After reading for a degree in mathematics at Somerville College in 1969, Professor Series went on to achieve a Kennedy Scholarship at Harvard University. In 1987, she was awarded a Junior Whitehead Prize by the London Mathematical Society and later, in 2014, was awarded its first Senior Anne Bennett Prize. She held a Senior Research Fellowship at the Engineering and Physical; Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) from 1999 – 2004. Currently, she is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society and of the Institute of Mathematics and Applications.
Professor Series is a pure mathematician known for her work on symbolic coding of geodesics on hyperbolic surfaces and for novel contributions to the study of three dimensional hyperbolic manifolds via their fractal limit sets. She proved important results on simple curves on surfaces. In three dimensions, she developed methods which in principle allow one to compute the discreteness locus of a parameterised family of Moebius maps. Her beautiful book Indra’s Pearls, co-authored by D. Mumford and D. Wright, gives some background on her work and research.
In 1986 she was a founder member of European Women in Mathematics, and in 2015 became the first vice-chair of the International Mathematical Union’s Committee for Women in Mathematics.