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Krystyna M. Kuperberg (born Krystyna M. Trybulec; 17 July 1944) is a Polish-American mathematician who currently works as a professor of mathematics at Auburn University and is the former Alumni Professor of Mathematics there.
Her parents, Jan W. and Barbara H. Trybulec, were pharmacists and owned a pharmacy in Tarnów. Her older brother is Andrzej Trybulec. Her husband Włodzimierz Kuperberg and her son Greg Kuperberg are also mathematicians, while her daughter Anna Kuperberg is a photographer.
After attending high school in Gdańsk, she entered the University of Warsaw in 1962, where she studied mathematics. Her first mathematics course was taught by Andrzej Mostowski; later she attended topology lectures of Karol Borsuk and became fascinated by topology.
After obtaining her undergraduate degree, Kuperberg began graduate studies at Warsaw under Borsuk, but stopped after earning a master's degree. She left Poland in 1969 with her family to live in Sweden, then moved to the United States in 1972. She finished her Ph.D. in 1974, from Rice University, under the supervision of William Jaco. In the same year, both she and her husband were appointed to the faculty of Auburn University.
In 1987 she solved a problem of Knaster concerning bi-homogeneity of continua. In the 1980s she became interested in fixed points and topological aspects of dynamical systems. In 1989 Kuperberg and Coke Reed solved a problem posed by Stan Ulam in the Scottish Book. The solution to that problem led to her well-known 1993 work in which she constructed a smooth counterexample to the Seifert conjecture. She has since continued to work in dynamical systems.
In 1995 Kuperberg received the Alfred Jurzykowski Award from the Kościuszko Foundation. Her major lectures include an AMS Plenary Lecture in March 1995, an MAA Plenary Lecture in January 1996, and an ICM invited talk in 1998. In 2012 she became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
Selected publications
- K. Kuperberg, A smooth counterexample to the Seifert conjecture, Ann. of Math. (2) 140 (1994), no. 3, 723–732.
- G. Kuperberg and K. Kuperberg, Generalized counterexamples to the Seifert conjecture, Ann. of Math. (2) 143 (1996), no. 3, 547–576.