Kirsten Wickelgren featured in Quanta Magazine

Duke mathematician, Professor Kirsten Wickelgren, is featured in a Quanta Magazine article entitled “New Math Revives Geometry’s Oldest Problems”. The article tells about how Professor Wickelgren and her collaborator founded the field of quadratically enriched enumerative geometry, giving an original application of some very abstract machinery to solve concrete counting problems that can be traced back to the ancient Greeks and have continued to entrance mathematicians for millennia.  For instance, how many straight lines lie on a surface defined by a degree-3 equation in 3 variables?  The answer depends on whether you work with the real numbers or you allow complex lines as well.  The power of Professor Wickelgren's approach lies in giving a uniform answer that simultaneously encodes the counts over the real and the complex numbers, along with more exotic number systems like finite fields and non-Archimedean fields.  Quadratically enriched enumerative geometry is now a thriving area of research.

Professor Wickelgren's research intersects algebraic topology, algebraic topology, and number theory.