Nancy Hingston facts for kids

Nancy Burgess Hingston is an American mathematician. She studies complex math topics like algebraic topology and differential geometry. She is now a professor emerita of mathematics at The College of New Jersey. This means she used to teach there and is still connected to the university.

Early Life and Education

Nancy Hingston grew up in a family that loved learning. Her father, William Hingston, was a superintendent for schools. Her mother taught math and computer science in high school.

Nancy went to the University of Pennsylvania. She studied two subjects at once: mathematics and physics. After a year of studying physics in graduate school, she decided to focus on math. She earned her PhD in 1981 from Harvard University. Her teacher there was a famous mathematician named Raoul Bott.

Her Career in Math

Before working at TCNJ, Nancy Hingston taught at the University of Pennsylvania. She has also visited the Institute for Advanced Study many times. This is a special place where smart people do research. Since 1994, she has helped with a program there for women in mathematics.

What Nancy Hingston Discovered

Nancy Hingston has made big discoveries in math. She studies shapes and movements, especially things called closed geodesics. Imagine a path on a curved surface, like the shortest way around a ball. If you keep going, you might come back to where you started. That's a closed geodesic. She also studies periodic orbits, which are like paths that repeat over and over.

In her very first paper, she showed that most curved surfaces have endless closed geodesics. Later, in the 1990s, she proved how fast these closed geodesics grow on a special 2-sphere shape.

In the 2000s, she solved a very old math problem called the Conley conjecture. This problem was about how certain systems move. She proved that these systems always have endless repeating points. Another mathematician, Viktor Ginzburg, later used her ideas to show this for even more types of systems.

Awards and Recognition

Nancy Hingston is a well-known mathematician. She was asked to speak at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2014. This is a very important event for mathematicians around the world.

She is also a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. This honor is given to mathematicians who have made important contributions. She received it for her work on shapes and closed geodesics.

Her Family Life

Nancy Hingston is married to Jovi Tenev, who is a lawyer. They have three children.