Konstanze Rietsch

Konstanze Christina "Konni" Rietsch is a mathematician specializing in algebraic geometry. Educated in Austria and the US, she works in the UK as Professor of Geometry at King's College London.

Research

Rietsch's research concerns the geometry of flag varieties, the mirror symmetry of Calabi–Yau manifolds, the theory of Gromov–Witten invariants, Lie theory, and quantum cohomology.^[1] She is particularly known for her "foundational works" in the 1990s with George Lusztig, introducing the positive Grassmannian.^[2]

Beyond pure mathematics, Rietsch is a member of the Music and Acoustics Research Centre at King's College London.^[3] She has studied the music theory of the Tonnetz and has collaborated with Elaine Chew in a new musical composition based on her theoretical work in this area.^[4]

Education and career

Rietsch received a master's degree in 1993 from the University of Vienna in 1993, with a master's thesis on Lie theory. She completed a Ph.D. in 1998 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.^[1] Her doctoral dissertation, Total Positivity and Real Flag Varieties, was supervised by George Lusztig.^[5]

Following her doctorate, she visited the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey,^[6] and became a postdoctoral research fellow in Newnham College, Cambridge.^[7] Next, she became a Violette and Samuel Glasstone Research Fellow at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford.^[8]

She moved to King's College in 2002. As well as being Professor of Geometry there, she is deputy head of the mathematics department for education, and a governor of the King's College London Mathematics School.^[9]

Recognition

Rietsch is an invited speaker at the 2026 International Congress of Mathematicians.^[10]