Rate My Professor Holly Krieger

Holly Krieger is Professor of Mathematics in the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics at the University of Cambridge, and Corfield Fellow at Murray Edwards College. She completed the mathematics honors program for her undergraduate degree at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and earned her master's degree and PhD from the University of Illinois at Chicago. After her PhD, she held a three-year NSF postdoctoral fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the supervision of Bjorn Poonen. In 2016, she joined Cambridge as Corfield Lecturer and Fellow at Murray Edwards College, advancing to Professor in 2022. Her research specializes in arithmetic dynamics, the emerging field studying relationships between dynamics of one complex variable and arithmetic geometry of abelian varieties. She investigates arithmetic and algebraic aspects of complex dynamical systems families, focusing on unlikely intersections, equidistribution, and dynamical orbits' properties, particularly at the intersection of number theory and complex dynamics.

Krieger's accomplishments include the 2020 Whitehead Prize from the London Mathematical Society for deep contributions to arithmetic dynamics and equidistribution, and the 2023 Philip Leverhulme Prize recognizing her work bridging number theory and complex dynamics. Key publications are 'Uniform Manin-Mumford for a family of genus 2 curves' (Annals of Mathematics, 2020, with L. DeMarco, H. Ye), 'Common preperiodic points for quadratic polynomials' (Journal of Modern Dynamics, 2022, with L. DeMarco, H. Ye), 'Birational maps with transcendental dynamical degree' (Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, 2023, with J.P. Bell, J. Diller, M. Jonsson), 'Hénon maps with many rational periodic points' (2024, with H. Kim, M.-I. Postolache, V. Szeto), and 'A dynamical Shafarevich theorem for endomorphisms of ℙ^ℕ' (Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society, 2025, with J. Juul, N. Looper, N.M. Mavraki). A member of the Algebraic Geometry research group, she teaches courses including Part III Complex Dynamics and contributes to public engagement via Numberphile videos with over 11 million views and public lectures on fractals and dynamical systems.