Kate Adebola Okikiolu (born 1965) is a British mathematician.^[2] She is known for her work with elliptic differential operators as well as her work with inner-city children.^[3]

Early life and education

Okikiolu was born in 1965 in England. Her father was George Olatokunbo Okikiolu, a renowned Nigerian mathematician^[4] and the most published black mathematician on record.^[5] Her British mother was a high school mathematics teacher. Okikiolu received a B.A. in mathematics from Cambridge University in 1987. In 1991 she earned her Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California at Los Angeles,^[6] for her thesis The Analogue of the Strong Szego Limit Theorem on the Torus and the 3-Sphere.^[5][7][8]

Career

Based on her PhD work, Okikiolu resolved a conjecture of Peter Wilcox Jones concerning a continuous version of the travelling salesman problem.^[9] in her paper Characterization of subsets of rectifiable curves in Rⁿ.^[10] Okikiolu was an instructor and later assistant professor at Princeton University from 1993 to 1995. She then worked as a visiting assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and joined the faculty at the University of California at San Diego in 1995.^[7] In 2011 she joined the Mathematics Department at Johns Hopkins University.^[11]

She was an invited speaker at the 1996 meeting of the Association of Women in Mathematics.^[12] She also delivered the Claytor-Woodard lecture at the 2002 meeting of the National Association of Mathematicians, an organization for African-American mathematicians.^[7]

Honors and awards

In 1997, Okikiolu won a Sloan Research Fellowship,^[13] becoming the first black recipient of this fellowship. In 1997 she also was awarded a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers^[14] for both her mathematical research and her development of mathematics curricula for inner-city school children. This award is given to only 60 scientists and engineers each year and has a prize of $500,000.^[7]