Jenny Harrison

Jenny Harrison is a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley.

For the character, see Jenny Harrison (Shortland Street).

Jenny Harrison
Born	Atlanta, Georgia, US
Education	University of Alabama (BA) University of Warwick (PhD)
Known for	Contributions to geometric analysis, chainlets
Scientific career
Fields	Mathematics
Institutions	University of California, Berkeley
Doctoral advisor	Christopher Zeeman

Education and early career

Harrison grew up in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and earned her undergraduate degree from the University of Alabama.^[1] Awarded a Marshall Scholarship, she pursued her graduate studies at the University of Warwick. While at Warwick, Harrison produced a counterexample to a conjecture of Arnaud Denjoy (a similar one was discovered independently by Charles Fefferman and William Thurston) which was published in the Annals of Mathematics in 1975.^[2] She completed her PhD that same year under the supervision of Christopher Zeeman.^[3]

Hassler Whitney was Harrison's postdoctoral adviser at the Institute for Advanced Study, and she was also one of the Miller Research Fellows at Berkeley. She was on the tenured faculty at the University of Oxford (Somerville College) from 1978 to 1981, before returning to Berkeley as an assistant professor.

In 1986, after being denied tenure, Harrison filed a lawsuit alleging gender discrimination. The case drew national attention within the academic community. A 1993 settlement led to a new review of her research by an independent panel of seven mathematicians and scientists, who unanimously recommended her promotion to full professor.^[4]

Later career

Harrison specializes in geometric analysis and areas in the intersection of algebra, geometry, and geometric measure theory. She introduced and developed with collaborators a theory of generalized functions called differential chains^[5][6] that unifies an infinitesimal calculus with the classical theory of the smooth continuum, a long outstanding problem. The infinitesimals are constructive and arise from methods of standard analysis, as opposed to the nonstandard analysis of Abraham Robinson. The methods apply equally well to domains such as soap films, fractals, charged particles, and Whitney stratified spaces, placing them on the same footing as smooth submanifolds in the resulting calculus. The results include optimal generalizations and simplifications of the theorems of Stokes, Gauss and Green. She has pioneered applications of differential chains to the calculus of variations, physics, and continuum mechanics. Her solution to Plateau's problem^[7] is the first proof of existence of a solution to a universal Plateau's problem for finitely many boundary curves, taking into account all soap films arising in nature, including nonorientable films with triple junctions, as well as solutions of Jesse Douglas,^[8] Herbert Federer and Wendell Fleming.^[9]

While a graduate student at the University of Warwick, Zeeman introduced Harrison to Plateau's problem. She found a counterexample to the Seifert conjecture^[10] at Oxford. In a Berkeley seminar in 1983 she proposed the existence of a general theory linking these together, and the theory of differential chains began to evolve. Jenny Harrison and Harrison Pugh proved that the topological vector space of differential chains satisfies a universal property determined by two natural axioms.^[6] They used the theory to provide the first universal solution to Plateau's problem, including soap film regularity, building upon Harrison's earlier paper.^[11]

Awards and fellowships

• Foundational Questions Institute, research award, 2009
• Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science, Miller Professor, 2007
• Rockefeller University, Visiting Research Professor, 1996–97
• Yale University, National Science Foundation, Visiting Scholar, 1989–90
• Oxford University, CUF Lecturer and Tutorial Fellow, Somerville College, 1978–81
• Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science, Miller Fellow, 1977–78
• Institute for Advanced Study, Visiting Fellow, Princeton, 1975–76