Birgit Speh

Birgit Speh (born 1949)^[1] is a Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at Cornell University.^[2] She is known for her work in Lie groups, including Speh representations (also known as Speh's representations).^[3]

Birgit Speh
Born	1949 (age 75–76)
Citizenship	United States
Alma mater	Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Known for	Lie groups
Awards	Fellow of the American Mathematical Society
Scientific career
Fields	Mathematics
Institutions	Cornell University
Thesis	Some Results on Principal Series of GL(n,R)  (1977)
Doctoral advisor	Bertram Kostant

Career

Speh received her Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1977.^[4] She was the first female mathematician to be given tenure by Cornell University, and the first to receive the title of Professor.^[5]

Awards and honors

In 2012, Speh became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.^[6] She was selected to give the 2020 AWM-AMS Emmy Noether Lecture at the 2020 Joint Mathematics Meetings.^[7]

Selected publications

• Speh, Birgit; Vogan, David A. Jr. Reducibility of generalized principal series representations. Acta Math. 145 (1980)
• Speh, Birgit. Unitary representations of Gl(n,R) with nontrivial (g,K)-cohomology. Invent. Math. 71 (1983), no. 3, 443–465.
• Speh, Birgit. The unitary dual of Gl(3,R) and Gl(4,R). Math. Ann. 258 (1981/82), no. 2, 113–133.