Sarah Witherspoon

Sarah Jane Witherspoon is an American mathematician interested in topics in abstract algebra, including Hochschild cohomology^[SW99] and quantum groups.^[W96][BW04] She is a professor of mathematics at Texas A&M University.^[1]

Sarah Witherspoon
Born	Sarah Jane Witherspoon
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Arizona State University University of Chicago
Scientific career
Fields	Mathematics
Institutions	University of Toronto Mills College University of Wisconsin–Madison Mount Holyoke College University of Massachusetts Amherst Amherst College Texas A&M University

Education

Witherspoon graduated from Arizona State University in 1988,^[1] where she earned the Charles Wexler Mathematics Prize as the best mathematics student at ASU that year.^[2] She went on to graduate study in mathematics at the University of Chicago, and completed her Ph.D. in 1994.^[1] Her dissertation, supervised by Jonathan Lazare Alperin, was The Representation Ring of the Quantum Double of a Finite Group.^[3]

Career

Witherspoon taught at the University of Toronto from 1994 to 1998. After holding visiting assistant professorships at Mills College, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Mount Holyoke College, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Amherst College, she joined the Texas A&M faculty in 2004.^[1]

Honors and awards

She was elected to the 2018 class of fellows of the American Mathematical Society, "for contributions to representation theory and cohomology of Hopf algebras, quantum groups, and related objects, and for service to the profession and mentoring".^[4] She was named MSRI Simons Professor for Spring 2020.^[5]

Selected publications

W96.	Witherspoon, S. J. (1996), "The representation ring of the quantum double of a finite group", Journal of Algebra, 179 (1): 305–329, doi:10.1006/jabr.1996.0014, hdl:10338.dmlcz/140609, MR 1367852

SW99.

Siegel, Stephen F.; Witherspoon, Sarah J. (1999), "The Hochschild cohomology ring of a group algebra", Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, Third Series, 79 (1): 131–157, doi:10.1112/S0024611599011958, MR 1687539, S2CID 53465181

BW04.

Benkart, Georgia; Witherspoon, Sarah (2004), "Two-parameter quantum groups and Drinfel'd doubles", Algebras and Representation Theory, 7 (3): 261–286, arXiv:math/0011064, doi:10.1023/B:ALGE.0000031151.86090.2e, MR 2070408, S2CID 2102411

W19.	Witherspoon, Sarah J. (2019), Hochschild Cohomology for Algebras, Graduate Studies in Mathematics, vol. 204, American Mathematical Society, ISBN 978-1-4704-4931-5