Maggie Miller (mathematician)

Not to be confused with Maggie Meller.

Maggie Hall Miller (born in 1993 or 1994^[1]) is a mathematician whose primary area of research is low-dimensional topology. She is an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin. She and co-authors made notable advancements to the understanding of Seifert surfaces. She was awarded the Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize in 2023.

Maggie Miller
Miller (right) in 2023
Born	1993 or 1994 (age 31–32)
Alma mater	Princeton University (PhD) University of Texas at Austin (BS)
Known for	Low-dimensional topology Work on Seifert surfaces
Awards	Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize (2023)
Scientific career
Fields	Mathematics, geometric topology
Institutions	University of Texas at Austin Stanford University
Thesis	Extending fibrations of knot complements to ribbon disk complements (2020)
Doctoral advisor	David Gabai
Website	web.ma.utexas.edu/users/mhm799/

Education and career

Miller completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Texas at Austin.^[2][3]

She earned her PhD in mathematics from Princeton University in 2020, with David Gabai as advisor (thesis: Extending fibrations of knot complements to ribbon disk complements).^[4][5]

After completing her doctoral degree, Miller worked as an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow from 2020 to 2021 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.^[2] Later as a Visiting Clay Fellow and Stanford Science Fellow, she spent time at Stanford University from 2021 to 2023.^[6] Miller is currently a tenure track professor at the University of Texas at Austin.^[7][8]

Mathematical work

In 2022, together with Kyle Hayden, Seungwon Kim, JungHwan Park and Isaac Sundberg, Miller proved a then 40 years old conjecture of Charles Livingston on Seifert surfaces.^[9][10]

Awards and honors

Miller was awarded a 2021 Clay Research Fellowship by the Clay Mathematics Institute for her work to expand topological research of manifolds.^[11][12][13] Her contributions were described by MIT as "important...to long-standing problems in low-dimensional topology."^[14] Clay Research Fellowships are awarded to recent PhD-holders who are selected for their research accomplishments and potential as leaders in mathematics research.^[15]

In her previous position at Stanford, she was a Stanford Science Fellow.^[6] Fellowships are awarded to early career scientists who have demonstrated scientific achievement and advancement, as well as a desire to collaborate with a diverse scholarly community.^[16][17]

Prior to her appointment at Stanford, Miller was awarded a National Science Foundation Mathematical Sciences Postdoc Research Fellowship while at MIT in the Department of Mathematics.^[18] She also has a record of accomplishment during her graduate studies, having been awarded the Princeton Mathematics Graduate Teaching Award in 2018 and the Charlotte Elizabeth Procter Fellowship in 2019.^[19][20]

She received the 2023 Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize, one of the Breakthrough Prizes, for "work on fibered ribbon knots and surfaces in 4-dimensional manifolds.",^[21] and was named one of Forbes' 30 Under 30 – Science for 2023.^[22]

In 2025, Miller was awarded a Sloan Research Fellowship.^[23]

Selected publications

• Juhász, András; Miller, Maggie; Zemke, Ian (2020). "Knot cobordisms, bridge index, and torsion in Floer homology". Journal of Topology. 13 (4): 1701–1724. arXiv:1904.02735. doi:10.1112/topo.12170. ISSN 1753-8416.
• Hughes, Mark C; Kim, Seungwon; Miller, Maggie (30 September 2020). "Isotopies of surfaces in 4–manifolds via banded unlink diagrams". Geometry & Topology. 24 (3): 1519–1569. arXiv:1804.09169. doi:10.2140/gt.2020.24.1519. ISSN 1364-0380.

Further reading

• Hartnett, Kevin (16 June 2022), "Surfaces So Different Even a Fourth Dimension Can't Make Them the Same", Quanta Magazine