Kate Okikiolu facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Kate Adebola Okikiolu
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| Born | 1965 (age 59–60) |
| Nationality | British |
| Alma mater | University of Cambridge UCLA |
| Awards | Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Mathematical analysis Elliptic operators |
| Institutions | Princeton University UCSD Johns Hopkins University |
| Thesis | The Analogue of the Strong Szego Limit Theorem on the Torus and the 3-Sphere (1991) |
| Doctoral advisors | Sun-Yung Alice Chang John B. Garnett |
Kate Adebola Okikiolu is a brilliant British mathematician born in 1965. She is famous for her advanced work in mathematics, especially with something called elliptic differential operators. She is also known for helping children in cities learn and love math.
Early Life and Education
Kate Okikiolu was born in England in 1965. Her father, George Olatokunbo Okikiolu, was a very well-known mathematician from Nigeria. Her mother, who was British, taught math in high school. So, math was definitely in her family!
Kate went to Cambridge University and earned her first degree in mathematics in 1987. Later, in 1991, she got her Ph.D. (a very high degree in a subject) in mathematics from the University of California at Los Angeles. Her Ph.D. paper was titled The Analogue of the Strong Szego Limit Theorem on the Torus and the 3-Sphere. This was a very complex and important piece of math research.
Kate Okikiolu's Career Journey
After finishing her Ph.D., Kate Okikiolu solved a big math problem related to the travelling salesman problem. This problem is about finding the shortest route to visit a set of cities and return home. Her work was published in a paper called Characterization of subsets of rectifiable curves in Rn.
She started her teaching career at Princeton University in 1993. She worked there as an instructor and then as an assistant professor until 1995. After that, she was a visiting assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1995, she joined the faculty at the University of California at San Diego. Later, in 2011, she became part of the Mathematics Department at Johns Hopkins University.
Kate Okikiolu has also been invited to speak at important math events. She spoke at a meeting for the Association of Women in Mathematics in 1996. In 2002, she gave the Claytor-Woodard lecture at a meeting for the National Association of Mathematicians. This group supports African-American mathematicians.
Awards and Special Recognition
Kate Okikiolu has received many important awards for her amazing work.
- In 1997, she won a Sloan Research Fellowship. She was the first black person to ever receive this special fellowship.
- Also in 1997, she received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. This award is given to only 60 scientists and engineers each year. It recognized both her advanced math research and her efforts to create math lessons for children in inner-city schools. The award also came with a prize of $500,000 to support her work.
