
Katherine Adebola Okikiolu was born in England in 1965. The schools she went to include Cambridge University and University of California at Los Angeles. At Cambridge University, she received her BA in Mathematics, and went to graduate school at University of California at Los Angeles where she earned her Ph.D. At UCLA, she worked with two others to solve "solve a problem concerning asymptotics of determinants of Toeplitz operators on the sphere and a conjecture of Peter Jones, characterizing subsets of rectifiable curves in Euclidean n-space and she has been exhibiting first rate mathematical abilties."
Two years later, she was a teacher and an assistant professor at Princeton University for another two years. Right after, she was a visiting assistant professor at MIT. In 1997, she became a resident of the United States. In June of the same year, Okikiolu became the first Black to get the Sloan Research Fellowship, the most prestigious award for young math researchers in the US. She's an associate professor of mathematics at University of California at San Diego.
Her family is also very math oriented. Her mother is a high school mathematics teacher and her dad George Okikiolu who is from Nigeria, is a mathematician.and inventor He has written more mathematics papers than any African mathematician. Katherine Okikiolu is married to mathematician Hans Lindblad.
Okikiolu's achievements and honors include earning a Ph.D. from the University of California at Los Angeles and doing postdoctoral work at Princeton's Institute of Advanced Study and MIT. In 1997, she was awarded the prestigious Sloan Research Fellowship and was a recipient of the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (500.000 dollars). In 2001, she became the first black woman to publish an article in the Annals of Mathematics, a journal of research papers in pure mathematics founded in 1884. As a research mathematician, Okikiolu has achieved success and contributed to the development of mathematical ideas in the twenty-first century.
Source:http://www.africansuccess.org/visuFiche.php?id=438&lang=en
http://www.math.buffalo.edu/mad/madgreatest.html
Share