Agata Smoktunowicz facts for kids

Agata Smoktunowicz (born October 12, 1973) is a mathematician from Poland. She works as a professor at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. Her special area of study is called abstract algebra. This part of mathematics looks at rules and structures that are more general than regular numbers.

Amazing Discoveries in Math

Agata Smoktunowicz has made some very important discoveries in mathematics. She built special types of mathematical structures called "noncommutative nil rings." This helped her solve a big problem that a famous mathematician named Irving Kaplansky had posed in 1970.

She also proved something called the Artin–Stafford gap conjecture. This idea explains that a certain measurement for mathematical structures, called the Gelfand–Kirillov dimension, cannot be between the numbers 2 and 3.

Another one of her findings was an example that showed a long-held idea might be wrong. This was about how certain mathematical properties behave when you add variables to them. Her work suggested that another big math problem, the Köthe conjecture, might not be true.

Awards and Special Honours

Agata Smoktunowicz has received many awards for her important work. In 2006, she was invited to speak at the International Congress of Mathematicians. This is a very big honour in the math world.

She won the Whitehead Prize from the London Mathematical Society in 2006. In 2008, she received the European Mathematical Society Prize. The Edinburgh Mathematical Society gave her the Sir Edmund Whittaker Memorial Prize in 2009.

In 2009, she became a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. This means she was chosen as a distinguished member of Scotland's national academy of science and letters. In 2012, she was one of the first people to become a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. She also won the annual research prize from the Polish Academy of Sciences in 2018. Most recently, in 2023, she was awarded the Senior Whitehead Prize by the London Mathematical Society.

Her Journey in Education and Career

Agata Smoktunowicz completed her first university degree, a master's degree, at the University of Warsaw in 1997. She then earned her PhD in 1999 from the Institute of Mathematics at the Polish Academy of Sciences. She continued her studies and received a "habilitation" in 2007, also from the Polish Academy of Sciences. A habilitation is a special qualification in some European countries that allows a scholar to teach at university level.

Before joining the University of Edinburgh, she worked for a short time at Yale University and the University of California, San Diego in the United States. In 2005, she started working at the University of Edinburgh. Just two years later, in 2007, she was promoted to a full professor there.

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In Spanish: Agata Smoktunowicz para niños