Jennifer Schultens facts for kids

Jennifer Carol Schultens, born in 1965, is an American mathematician. She is an expert in areas of math called low-dimensional topology and knot theory. Currently, she works as a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Davis.

Becoming a Mathematician

Jennifer Schultens went to the University of California, Santa Barbara for her advanced studies. She earned her Ph.D. degree there in 1993. A Ph.D. is a very high university degree. Her main research project, called a dissertation, was about "Classification of Heegaard Splittings for Some Seifert Manifolds." Her professor, Martin Scharlemann, helped her with this work.

Exploring Shapes and Knots

Professor Schultens has written important books about her math research. One book is called Introduction to 3-Manifolds. This book helps people learn about three-dimensional spaces. She also co-wrote another book, Lecture Notes On Generalized Heegaard Splittings.

Her early research focused on something called Heegaard splittings. This is a way to understand how three-dimensional shapes, called "3-manifolds," can be cut into simpler pieces. She published her findings in a well-known math journal.

She also studies how different features of knots behave. For example, she looks at the "bridge number" of a knot. This number tells you how many "bridges" you need to cross to draw the knot. She also studies what happens when you join two knots together, which is called the "connected sum" operation.

Family Life

Jennifer Schultens is married to another mathematician, Michael Kapovich.