I was recently installed as the Robert G. and Maxine W. Scheibe Professor of Mathematics at Washington University in St. Louis. I’m honored by this recognition and grateful to the Scheibe family for their generosity, and to the University and my colleagues in the Department of Mathematics for their support.
In my remarks, I told an old story about David Hilbert. Supposedly he was asked to say a few words at a student’s funeral and began, “Let H be a Hilbert space…” I don’t know if the story is true. The joke works because mathematicians are often seen as caring only about abstractions. My experience has been the opposite: mathematics is deeply human.
When I started at the University of Houston, research mathematics wasn’t yet a life I knew how to imagine. Someone had to show me that path existed. At Brown, my advisor Sergei Treil, and through him Nikolai Nikolski, taught me how mathematics is made. Michael Lacey, Jill Pipher, and Eric Sawyer each shaped my career through advice, ideas, and years of generosity. Collaborators around the world have made the work a shared conversation. My Ph.D. students and postdocs have taught me as much as I’ve taught them, and watching them succeed is the most rewarding part of this job.
Above all, I thank my family. Washington University gave me a place to build a career. My family made that career possible.
I’m grateful to everyone who helped me get here, and I hope to honor that gift by helping the next generation get where they are going.