Karen Smith, lecture title TBA

Professor Karen E. Smith is the William Fulton Distinguished University Professor of Mathematics and chair of the Department of Mathematics at the University of Michigan. Her research lies at the interface of commutative algebra and algebraic geometry, with particular emphasis on using methods from positive characteristic to address questions about algebraic varieties over fields of characteristic zero.

Professor Smith has been a leading figure in developing and applying Frobenius methods in algebraic geometry. Her work helped establish deep connections between singularities detected through reduction to characteristic p and rational singularities and other classes of singularities arising in birational geometry. She also made fundamental contributions to understanding how Frobenius splitting and related techniques can be used to study global geometric properties of projective varieties, including positivity and projective embeddings.

Another important direction of her work concerns multiplier ideals and test ideals. She has contributed to the development of asymptotic multiplier ideals in characteristic zero and their positive-characteristic analogues, test ideals, as well as associated invariants such as jumping numbers. These ideas have become important tools connecting commutative algebra, singularity theory, and birational geometry.

Professor Smith's contributions have been recognized with numerous honors, including the Ruth Lyttle Satter Prize in Mathematics from the American Mathematical Society and the AWM–AMS Noether Lecture. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and she delivered the AMS Colloquium Lectures in 2022.