Frances Kirwan

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

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.

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. Sheintroduced 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 at Clare College, Cambridge.

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. 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.

• London Mathematical Society Whitehead Prize, 1989
• Fellow of the Royal Society, 2001
• President, London Mathematical Society, 2003–2005
• EPSRC Senior Research Fellowship, 2005–2010, for her work in algebraic geometry
• Fellow of the American Mathematical Society, 2012
• London Mathematical Society Senior Whitehead Prize, 2013
• DBE for services to mathematics, 2014
• Member of Academia Europaea
• Chairman of the United Kingdom Mathematics Trust

Kirwan served on the medal selection committee for the awarding of the Fields medal to Prof Mirzakhani.

• Cohomology of Quotients in Symplectic and Algebraic Geometry. Mathematical Notes. 31. Princeton University Press. 1984. ISBN 978-0691083704.
• An Introduction to Intersection Homology Theory. Longman Scientific and Technical. 1988. with Jonathan Woolf: 2nd edn. CRC Press. 2006. ISBN 978-1584881841.
• Complex Algebraic Curves. London Mathematical Society Student Texts. Cambridge University Press. 1992. ISBN 978-0521423533.