Lillian Pierce

Lillian Beatrix Pierce is a mathematician whose research connects number theory with harmonic analysis.[1] She was one of the first mathematicians to prove nontrivial upper bounds on the number of elements of finite order in an ideal class group.[2] She won the 2018 Sadosky Prize for research that "spans and connects a broad spectrum of problems ranging from character sums in number theory to singular integral operators in Euclidean spaces" including in particular "a polynomial Carleson theorem for manifolds".[3] She is a professor of mathematics at Duke University, and a von Neumann Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study.[4]

Pierce was home-schooled in Fallbrook, California[1][5][6] and began playing the violin at age four.[7] By age 11 she began performing professionally as a violinist.[1] As a teenager, she also started taking classes at a local community college, accumulating so many units that some of the universities she applied to refused to consider her for freshman admission.[7] She entered Princeton University majoring in mathematics but intending to pursue an MD–PhD program;[8] under the influence of faculty mentor and undergraduate thesis supervisor Elias M. Stein, her interests shifted towards pure mathematics.[1][8][5] As an undergraduate, she also became an intern at the National Security Agency.[1] She was Princeton's 2002 valedictorian and became a Rhodes Scholar, repeating two accomplishments of her brother Niles Pierce from nine years earlier.[5]

She earned a master's degree at the University of Oxford in 2004.[4][1] Returning to Princeton for doctoral study in mathematics, she completed her Ph.D. in 2009. Her dissertation, Discrete Analogues in Harmonic Analysis, was supervised by Stein.[4][9] After postdoctoral studies with Roger Heath-Brown at Oxford and at the Hausdorff Center for Mathematics in Bonn, Germany, she became an assistant professor at Duke in 2014.[4][1] In 2018, she was awarded the Association for Women in Mathematics Sadosky Prize.[10] She received the 2019 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers.[11] She was elected a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society in the Class of 2021. Her citation read “For contributions to number theory and harmonic analysis.”[12]

Her husband, Tobias Overath, also works at Duke as a neuroscientist.[1]