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Amie Wilkinson
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Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Biography
Amie Wilkinson was given the names Anne Marie Wilkinson but is usually known as Amie. She is the daughter of Ruth Elaine VanDemark (1944-2012) and her husband Leland Wilkinson (1944-2021). Ruth VanDemark was born in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, graduated from Vassar College in 1966 and began to study at the Harvard Divinity School. There she met Leland Wilkinson who had been born 5 November 1944 in New York, had graduated from Harvard University in 1966 and also began studying at Harvard Divinity School. Ruth and Leland were married on 23 June 1967 in Sioux Falls; they had two children, Anne Marie Wilkinson known as Amie, the subject of this biography, and Caroline Wilkinson who was two years younger than her sister.To understand Amie's upbringing we should look briefly at the careers of her parents. Leland Wilkinson graduated from Harvard Divinity School in 1969, studied psychology at Yale where he was awarded a Ph.D. in 1975, then was an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago from 1976 to 1980 when he was promoted to associate professor. In 1991 he became an adjunct professor of statistics at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois and in 2007 he became an adjunct professor of computer science at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Ruth VanDemark returned to academic studies after the births of her two daughters and graduated from the University of Connecticut Law School in 1976. She moved to Evanston with her husband and children and became a partner and head of the appellate department at Wildman, Harold, Allen & Dixon. In the 1990s she studied at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago and became a Lutheran minister at Wicker Park Lutheran Church in Chicago. Amie Wilkinson writes about her parents in [30]:-
My mother had a conspiratorial nature and a wild imagination. She was an early feminist who was caught by surprise by two children within three years of getting married. After spending a few very frustrating years as a stay-at-home mom, she decided to take back her maiden name when I was 4 and my sister 2 and applied to law school. She joined the National Organization for Women and worked toward passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. She also taught me feminism with a distinctly misandrist bent. ... I admired my mother and emulated her and was proud that she had a different last name. She gave me the notion that I could do anything I wanted and that I would probably have to fight like hell to do it.Amie Wilkinson attended a Montessori school for preschool and then kindergarten. Her love of mathematics began when she was five years old at the Montessori school where she played with toys which were designed as fun objects which taught one to count in different number bases. Her parents were highly involved in the political events of the early 1970s and they involved Amie from a young age. They opposed the Vietnam War and took Amie with them when they were campaigning for George McGovern in his 1972 bid for the presidency which Richard Nixon won. Amie's parents then became involved in the Watergate investigations and again Amie had an early introduction to American and world politics. Although she received this early introduction to political activities through her parents, in fact she was often left alone as a child and given a freedom which she now thinks helped develop her scientific thinking. Although she never felt academically pressurised by her parents, they did arrange for her to skip the fourth grade of primary school.
My father was a scientist, with a keen eye for the playful. While my mother was in law school, he was a Ph.D. student who assumed a lot of childcare responsibilities. For my sister and me, this meant hanging around with a slightly overgrown child who was most engaged with us when he himself was engaged in a project. ... Like my mom, my dad resisted conventional constraints. A high school maths whiz, he chose to major in English in college. He next went to divinity school where he met my mom, and then decided to become a social worker. Halfway through a PhD programme in psychology, he became fascinated with computers and the statistical side of the discipline, a field called psychometrics. He dedicated his dissertation to his great loves: his wife, his children, and the computer. He switched careers several times in his life, taught himself both Hebrew and Russian, commuted on roller skates, and was an accomplished amateur pianist.
At the age of thirteen, in 1981, Wilkinson entered Evanston Township High School. Already knowing that mathematics was the subject for her, she was further encouraged through excellent teaching by John Benson. Benson had studied mathematics at Luther College and Vanderbilt University graduating with a Master's Degree in 1969. He taught mathematics for 42 years at Evanston Township High School beginning in 1968. He received the Presidential Awards for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching in 1987. We learn something of Wilkinson's achievements at Evanston Township High School from the Yearbooks [1], [2] and [3]. In 1982 she was a member of the Debate Team and in the North Suburban Math League. In 1984 she was in Atlantic Pacific [2]:-
... one of four maths contests that are held monthly at Evanston Township High School. Atlantic Pacific and Illinois Math League are both half hour tests. Usually about twenty students attend each test. These tests are fairly advanced, and they help students learn maths quickly and efficiently.She was also in the Mathletes Team, the Speech Team, and Croo [2]:-
Croo is a group of about fifteen students who take care of everything that isn't done by the actors themselves. Croo builds all the sets (including most props) and takes care of lighting and sound. After the actors have left they remain to clan up. Needless to say, Croo works after school every day and often on Saturdays. Croo is an elite club. One must have worked more than three shows to be a member.Wilkinson was taught physics by Robert Horton, an outstanding teacher who gave up college teaching after a year and began teaching at Evanston Township High School in the 1970s. He was enthusiastic about putting students forward for a Westinghouse Award [26]:-
As Evanston's mentor for physics students interested in the contest, which honours original research, Horton serves as teacher, adviser, counsellor and coach. Competing for the Westinghouse Awards requires more than a year of work by students, who must sacrifice afternoons, evenings and a considerable part of the summer before their senior years. ... Horton's students do all of their work for the contest at school and home. "The amazing thing about him is that he's not a big research scientist, yet somehow he's able to produce these Westinghouse finalists," said Amie Wilkinson, an assistant maths professor at Northwestern University who was a 1985 honouree while attending Evanston. At a time when the school had only five Apple computers, Horton and Wilkinson met early every day, carried a computer up the school elevator to the physics laboratory, conducted experiments and returned the computer before classes started.In 1985 Wilkinson graduated from Evanston Township High School, winning the two senior mathematics prizes, one for the best girl and one for the best overall student. She then began studying mathematics at Harvard University, writing in her application [30]:-
I am certain that I will enter a scientific profession, and I am fairly sure that I will become a mathematician ... I want to make thinking my profession.Her first year at Harvard went well but in her second year she began to find difficulties. These began in the abstract algebra course taught by Andrew Gleason, where she found difficulties with group theory. She wanted to have a geometric model for mathematical concepts and, although group theory can be taught in this way, it was not presented as such in Gleason's course. She lost a little of her enthusiasm for mathematics and explored other interests such as art. She continued to study mathematics, however, and was one of four students who took part in the 1987 Duluth Summer Research Program, a ten-week undergraduate research programme in mathematics supervised by Joseph A Gallian, a professor at the University of Minnesota Duluth. During this Research Experiences for Undergraduates Programme, she proved her first theorems which she published in the paper Circuits in Cayley digraphs of finite Abelian groups in the Journal of Graph Theory in 1990. Gallian wrote that "Wilkinson found an elementary, elegant, proof of some" known results.
Also in the summer of 1987 Wilkinson attended a talk on ergodic theory which she loved. Harvard did not teach courses on ergodic theory but Boston University did, and she attended an ergodic theory graduate course there but was "mostly lost." Despite this [30]:-
I decided to write a senior thesis on ergodic theory ... I felt a bit like I was exploring the wilderness, with little official supervision by the faculty at Harvard, but I liked it. It gave room to do my own thing, as I didn't seem to be particularly great at doing what the faculty themselves did.At the beginning of her final undergraduate year at Harvard she went to Andrew Gleason, who was her Director of Undergraduate Studies, and asked for his advice on whether she should apply to graduate schools. He said [30]:-
If you do choose to pursue mathematics further, you should know that in the end there is a great pyramid of mathematicians. A small number are at the very top, but the vast majority are at the bottom of this pyramid. As long as you're comfortable with the possibility of being at the bottom, I see no reason not to continue.Although greatly angered by this comment, Wilkinson was not discouraged and was instead motivated by her anger. She graduated from Harvard with a Bachelor of Arts in mathematics degree in June 1989. Asked about her future plans by a TV News Crew as she left the graduation ceremony, she said, "I have no idea!" She applied for several jobs and was offered an actuarial consulting position in Chicago. She accepted, found an apartment in downtown Chicago and was very happy with the job. She missed mathematics, however [18]:-
I came back home to Chicago, and I got a job as an actuary. I enjoyed my work, but I started to feel like there was a hole in my existence. There was something missing. I realised that suddenly my universe had become finite. Anything I had to learn for this job, I could learn eventually. I could easily see the limits of this job, and I realised that with mathematics there were so many things I could imagine that I would never know. That's why I wanted to go back and do mathematics. I love that feeling of this infinite horizon.Wilkinson applied for several postgraduate programmes and received several offers of a place. She was also awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (1990-1993). Her grades had not been outstanding at Harvard but the Duluth Summer Research Program and resulting paper pointed to her potential as a researcher. She accepted the offer from the University of California, Berkeley where she was assigned Charles C Pugh as her doctoral supervisor. Charles Chapman Pugh (born 16 June 1940) had been awarded a Ph.D. by Johns Hopkins University in 1965 and was an expert in dynamical systems. She described him as [15]:-
... one of the most gentle, open, enthusiastic mentors.Others who helped Wilkinson in the early stages of her research career include Lisa Goldberg, Michael Shub and Keith Burns. Lisa Goldberg was awarded a PhD in mathematics from Brandeis and then became a Professor of Mathematics at CUNY. She was visiting Berkeley when Wilkinson was a undertaking research there and connected her with mathematicians with similar interests. Michael Shub, works on dynamical systems, had obtained his Ph.D. degree at the University of California, Berkeley in 1967, and was from 1985 working for IBM's Thomas J Watson Research Center in Yorktown, New York. Keith Burns received his PhD from the University of Warwick in 1983, then held a postdoctoral position at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley. He works in dynamical systems and ergodic theory, was on the faculty of Northwestern from 1987 and was named an Alfred P Sloan Fellow in 1989.
During the years she was undertaking research for her Ph.D., in the summer of 1992 she was a Graduate Research Assistant at the Center for Nonlinear Studies, Los Alamos National Laboratories and in the winter of 1992 she was a visitor at IBM's Thomas J Watson Research Center in Yorktown. In the summer of 1993 she was a Member of the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques in France and in the winter of 1994 she was again at IBM's Thomas J Watson Research Center. She was awarded an IBM Graduate Research Fellowship for 1994-95.
Wilkinson was awarded a PhD from the University of California in May 1995 for her thesis Stable Ergodicity of the Time-One Map of a Geodesic Flow. The paper [29], which is the published version of her thesis, contains the following Acknowledgements:-
The contents of this paper originally comprised a Ph.D. dissertation at the University of California, Berkeley. The author thanks her advisor, Charles Pugh, for inspiration, guidance and support. Thanks also to Michael Shub, Keith Burns and the referee for useful suggestions.In fact up to 2024 Wilkinson published five papers with Pugh as a co-author, eight with Shub as a co-author and eleven with Burns as a co-author. There is one paper, Recent results about stable ergodicity (2001), with all four as co-authors.
From 1995 to 1996, she was a Benjamin Peirce Instructor at Harvard University. She then moved to Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, where she became Boas Assistant Professor of Mathematics; a 3-year non-tenure-track position.
On 28 December 1996, Wilkinson married Benson Stanley Farb (born 25 October 1967). Farb had graduated from Cornell University in 1989, obtained a PhD at Princeton University in 1994 under the direction of Bill Thurston, and then was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago. The New York Times reported their marriage [11]:-
Anne Marie Wilkinson, a daughter of Ruth E VanDemark and Leland Wilkinson of Evanston, Illinois, was married last evening to Benson Stanley Farb, the son of Mignon K Farb and Dr Stanley N Farb of Jeffersonville, Pennsylvania. The Rev Dr Frank C Senn, a Lutheran pastor, officiated with Rabbi Michael P Sternfield at the University Club in Chicago.Amie Wilkinson and Benson Farb have two children: Beatrice Farb and Felix Farb.
The bride, who is known as Amie, and the bridegroom are assistant professors of mathematics, she at Northwestern University in Evanston and he at the University of Chicago, where he is a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow.
The bride, 28, is keeping her name. She graduated cum laude from Harvard University and received a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California at Berkeley. Her father is a senior vice president of SPSS, a software company, and her mother is a lawyer, both in Chicago.
The bridegroom, 29, graduated summa cum laude from Cornell University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He received a Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton University. His mother retired as a special-education teacher in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. His father is an otolaryngologist in Norristown, Pennsylvania.
After her 3-year position at Northwestern University as Boas Assistant Professor of Mathematics, Wilkinson was appointed as an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Northwestern in 1999. In 2002 she was promoted to Associate Professor of Mathematics and from 2005 to 2011 she served as a Professor of Mathematics at Northwestern. During these years she had many visiting positions. She was at IBM's Thomas J Watson Research Center in Yorktown in the summers of 1997, 1998, 2000 and 2001. She was in France during the summers of 1996 and 1998 at Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques, and at the Université de Bourgogne in May 2002 and September 2003. She was invited to deliver prestigious lectures, for example in the Mechanics and Dynamical Systems session of the International Congress in Mathematical Physics held in Prague in August 2009 and in the Dynamical systems and ordinary differential equations session of the International Congress of Mathematicians held in Hyderabad in August 2010. At this Congress she gave the lecture Conservative Partially Hyperbolic Dynamics with the following Abstract:-
We discuss recent progress in understanding the dynamical properties of partially hyperbolic diffeomorphisms that preserve volume. The main topics addressed are density of stable ergodicity and stable accessibility, centre Lyapunov exponents, pathological foliations, rigidity, and the surprising interrelationships between these notions.She began the talk as follows:-
Here is a story, told at least in part through the exploits of one of its main characters. This character, like many a Hollywood (or Bollywood) star, has played a leading role in quite a few compelling tales; this one ultimately concerns the dynamics of partially hyperbolic diffeomorphisms.In 2011 she received her first major award, namely the Ruth Lyttle Satter Prize. You can read the citation and other details about this award at
Wilkinson left Northwestern University in 2012 and became a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Chicago. Let us quote from [15] her own description of her research:-
My research is in the area of dynamical systems, which is the study of the long term evolution of a space subject to a set of deterministic rules. Such rules are given, for example, by a system of ordinary differential equations. I study smooth systems in particular. I'm very interested in considering what happens to a smooth manifold when it is acted upon by a group, the simplest example being the group generated by a single diffeomorphism of the manifold.She continues to receive awards, honours, and invitations to deliver lectures. For a full list of these see [31], but let us mention just a few examples. In 2013 she became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society [4]:-
In this case you can picture the action of the dynamical system over time to be given by composing this diffeomorphism with itself, and one is interested in the long term behaviour of this iterated system. For example, what happens to a point in the manifold when one watches it evolve over time? What structures on this manifold are preserved under the action of this group? What measures on the space of probability measures on the manifold are preserved? What fractal-type structures are preserved?
There are three different types of questions that really interest me. The first is: you take an interesting type of dynamical behaviour such as mixing and you ask what mechanisms in the dynamical system will produce mixing, and by mechanisms I mean some rough property of the system that gives you only partial information about the system but will imply properties like ergodicity. And mechanisms typically produce robust behaviours, robust mixing is an example. I look for mechanisms that produce chaotic behaviour robustly. Part of my research has been focused on this type of question.
For contributions to dynamical systems.She gave the Distinguished Lecture Series at the University of California Los Angeles 21-25 May 2018. Her three lectures were titled The Ergodic Hypothesis and Beyond and can be watched at [33]. She gave the Opening Public Lecture of the 2018 Fields Medal Symposium on 5 November 2018 which was held to honour Maryam Mirzakhani. Wilkinson's lecture Illumination and the Work of Maryam Mirzakhan had the following Abstract:-
Turn on a light in the middle of a room: is every spot illuminated? If the room is a complicated labyrinth, then probably not, but what if the walls of the room are mirrors? We will explore the hidden corners of a mirrored room using the mathematical tools developed by Mirzakhani and her collaborators. The journey will take us through billiard tables and special kinds of surfaces resembling faceted donuts with many holes.In 2019 she was elected a Foreign Member, Academia Europaea and in 2020 she was awarded the prestigious Levi L Conant prize by the American Mathematical Society for the article "What are Lyapunov exponents, and why are they interesting?", published in the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society in 2017. In 2021 she was named to American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
In 2018 she said [8]:-
With age has come freedom to speak my mind, to act stupid, and to take risks. While research is as interesting as ever, my focus recently has also been on advising and mentoring, on helping to build the dynamics group at the University of Chicago, and on communicating mathematics to the world outside.She continues to make outstanding contributions in all these aspects of her professorship.
References (show)
- 1982 Yearbook, Evanston Township High School (1982).
- 1984 Yearbook, Evanston Township High School (1984).
- 1985 Yearbook, Evanston Township High School (1985).
- 2014 Class of the Fellows of the AMS, American Mathematical Society (2014).
https://www.ams.org/grants-awards/ams-fellows/fellows2014.pdf - 2011 Satter Prize, Notices of the American Mathematical Society 58 (4) (2011), 601-602.
https://www.ams.org/notices/201104/rtx110400601p.pdf - Academia Europaea, Department of Mathematics, University of Chicago (14 August 2019).
https://mathematics.uchicago.edu/news/article/academia-europaea1/ - Amie Wilkinson, Department of Mathematics, University of Chicago (2024).
https://mathematics.uchicago.edu/people/profile/amie-wilkinson/ - Amie Wilkinson, Notices of the American Mathematical Society 65 (3) (2018), 298-299.
- Amie Wilkinson to Receive the 2020 Conant Prize, Academia Europaea (2019).
https://www.ae-info.org/ae/Acad_Main/News_Archive/Amie%20Wilkinson - Amie Wilkinson, Academia Europaea (2024).
https://www.ae-info.org/ae/Member/Wilkinson_Amie - Amie Wilkinson, Benson S Farb, New York Times (29 December 1996).
- Amie Wilkinson, Benson S Farb, New York Times (29 December 1996).
- Amie Wilkinson, American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2024).
https://www.amacad.org/person/amie-wilkinson - Benson Farb and Amie Wilkinson Named to American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Department of Mathematics, University of Chicago (23 April 2021).
https://mathematics.uchicago.edu/news/article/faculty-named-to-american-academy-of-arts-and-sciences/ - A M Cherubini, Exploring the Wilderness: An Interview with Amie Wilkinson, European Women in Mathematics (2024).
https://www.europeanwomeninmaths.org/amie-wilkinson/ - G Johnson, NISS Notes the Passing of a Beloved Colleague, National Institute of Statistical Sciences (14 December 2021).
https://www.niss.org/news/niss-notes-passing-beloved-colleague - K Hartnett, A Mathematician Whose Only Constant Is Change, Quanta Magazine (13 June 2019).
https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-mathematician-whose-only-constant-is-change-20190613/ - E Lamb, Mathematics, Live: A Conversation with Laura DeMarco and Amie Wilkinson, Scientific American (11 June 2013).
https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/roots-of-unity/mathematics-live-demarco-wilkinson/ - E Lamb, Amie Wilkinson's Favorite Theorem, Scientific American (27 July 2017).
https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/roots-of-unity/amie-wilkinsons-favorite-theorem/?wt.mc=SA_Reddit-Share - Levi L Conant Prize, Amie Wilkinson, Department of Mathematics, University of Chicago (31 October 2019).
https://mathematics.uchicago.edu/news/article/levi-l.-conant-prize/ - MathFest Archive, Mathematical Association of America (2024).
https://maa.org/maa-mathfest-archive/ - C Merow Interview of Amie Wilkinson, Math Horizons (February 2016), 5-7.
http://digitaleditions.walsworthprintgroup.com/publication/index.php?m=7493&i=289441&p=6&ver=html5 - News from the AMS. Amie Wilkinson Will Receive the 2020 Conant Prize, American Mathematical Society (31 October 2019).
https://www.ams.org/tools/news?news_id=5588 - Papers by Amie Wilkinson, Department of Mathematics, University of Chicago (2024).
http://www.math.uchicago.edu/~wilkinso/papers/papers.html - Plenary lecture: Amie Wilkinson, 2024 Netherlands Mathematical Congress (3 April 2024).
https://mathematischcongres.nl/nmc-2024/plenary-lecture-amie-wilkinson/ - Robert Horton: Head Coach for Science, Chicago Tribune (Sunday 25 January 1998).
- Ruth Elaine VanDemark, Chicago Tribune (Sunday 17 June 2012).
- S Strogatz, Amie Wilkinson Sees the Dynamic Chaos in Puff Pastry, Quanta Magazine (3 May 2021).
https://www.quantamagazine.org/amie-wilkinson-sees-the-dynamic-chaos-in-puff-pastry-20210503/ - A Wilkinson, Stable Ergodicity of the Time-One Map of a Geodesic Flow, Ergodic Theory and Dynamical Systems 18 (6) (1998), 1545-1587.
- A Wilkinson, Before I Was a Mathematician, in Deborah M Shlian (ed.), Lessons Learned: Stories from Women Leaders in STEM (American Association for Physician Leadership, 2023).
- A Wilkinson CV, Department of Mathematics, University of Chicago (2024).
http://math.uchicago.edu/~wilkinso/cv.pdf - Eight UChicago faculty elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences, University of Chicago News (23 April 2021).
https://news.uchicago.edu/story/eight-uchicago-faculty-elected-american-academy-arts-and-sciences - Distinguished Lecture Series by Amie Wilkinson, University of California Los Angeles (21-25 May 2018).
https://ww3.math.ucla.edu/dls/amie-wilkinson/
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Written by J J O'Connor and E F Robertson
Last Update March 2025
Last Update March 2025