Dame Frances Clare Kirwan, (born 21 August 1959) is a British mathematician, currently Savilian Professor of Geometry at the University of Oxford. Her fields of specialisation are algebraic and symplectic geometry.

Education

Kirwan was educated at Oxford High School, and studied maths as an undergraduate at Clare College in the University of Cambridge. She took a D.Phil at Oxford in 1984, with the dissertation title The Cohomology of Quotients in Symplectic and Algebraic Geometry, which was supervised by Michael Atiyah.

Research

Kirwan's research interests include moduli spaces in algebraic geometry, geometric invariant theory (GIT), and in the link between GIT and moment maps in symplectic geometry. Her work endeavours to understand the structure of geometric objects by investigation of their algebraic and topological properties. She introduced the Kirwan map. From 1983 to 1985 she held a junior fellowship at Harvard. From 1983 to 1986 she held a Fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford, before becoming a Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. She is an honorary fellow of Clare College, Cambridge and also at Magdalen College. In 1996, she was awarded the Title of Distinction of Professor of Mathematics. From 2004 to 2006 she was president of the London Mathematical Society, the second-youngest president in the society's history and only the second woman to be president. In 2005, she received a five-year EPSRC Senior Research Fellowship, to support her research on the moduli spaces of complex algebraic curves. In 2017, she was elected Savilian Professor of Geometry, becoming the first woman to hold the post. While this entailed a move to New College, Oxford she was elected an emeritus fellow at Balliol. She was the convenor of the 2008–9 meeting of European Women in Mathematics and deputy convenor of the following meeting in 2010–11.

Prizes, awards and scholarships

Kirwan served on the medal-selection committee that awarded the Fields medal to Maryam Mirzakhani.

Publications