Lisa Piccirillo facts for kids

Lisa Piccirillo is an American mathematician. She is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. She studies shapes and spaces, especially in areas called geometry and topology. She became famous for solving a very old puzzle in knot theory. This puzzle was about the Conway knot and had been unsolved for over 50 years!

Early Life and Hobbies

Lisa Piccirillo grew up in a town called Greenwood, in Maine. She went to Telstar Regional High School. Her mom was a math teacher for middle schoolers.

When she was a kid, Lisa had many interests. She enjoyed riding horses in a style called dressage. She was also active in her church's youth group. Plus, she loved participating in drama and playing music in the school band.

Education Journey

Lisa Piccirillo studied mathematics at Boston College. She earned her first degree, a Bachelor of Science, in 2013. Later, she went to the University of Texas at Austin. There, she earned her PhD in 2019. Her studies focused on a field called low-dimensional topology.

One of her professors, Elisenda Grigsby, said Lisa was very creative. She mentioned that Lisa wasn't like a "typical math genius" during her college years. This shows that being creative can be just as important as being super smart in math!

Solving the Conway Knot Puzzle

The Conway Knot, a famous mathematical puzzle.

The Conway knot is a special type of knot. It was named after the English mathematician John Horton Conway, who first wrote about it in 1970. For a long time, mathematicians knew the Conway knot was "topologically slice." This means it could be flattened in a certain way.

However, they didn't know if it was "smoothly slice." This is a trickier question about how the knot behaves in higher dimensions. It was a big mystery in knot theory for half a century!

How Lisa Solved It

Lisa Piccirillo learned about the Conway knot problem in 2018. At the time, she was a graduate student. She decided to work on the knot in her free time, just to "see what's so hard about this problem." She spent less than a week on it.

She used a special math tool called Rasmussen's s-invariant. With this tool, she proved that the Conway knot is not smoothly slice. This solved the long-standing puzzle! Her discovery helped complete the understanding of many knots with fewer than thirteen crossings.

A Surprising Discovery

Lisa found the answer very quickly. A few days later, she casually told a senior professor, Cameron Gordon, about her solution. She was surprised by her own discovery.

She later said that mathematicians usually try to prove big, general ideas. But she had solved a puzzle about just "one knot." However, she also realized that studying knots helps us understand more complex 3D and 4D spaces. Her work was praised as "mathematical beauty." It could even lead to new ways of understanding knots.

After her discovery was published, Lisa was offered a job as a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She worked there from 2020 to 2024.

Awards and Recognition

Lisa Piccirillo has received several important awards for her work.

• In 2021, she won the Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize. This award recognizes achievements by young women mathematicians.
• She also received a Clay Research Fellowship in 2021 for her work in topology.
• Additionally, she was awarded a Sloan Research Fellowship in 2021.

In 2020, a UK magazine called Prospect named Lisa as one of "The world's top 50 thinkers for the Covid-19 age."

See also

In Spanish: Lisa Piccirillo para niños