Rate My Professor Kate Petersen

Kate Petersen is Professor and Department Head of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics in the Swenson College of Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota Duluth. She received her PhD in Mathematics from the University of Texas in May 2005. Her dissertation, titled "One-Cusped Congruence Subgroups of PSL 2 (O K )," focused on arithmetic groups. Her academic career at the University of Minnesota Duluth encompasses research, teaching, and leadership in the department.

Petersen's research centers on low-dimensional topology and number theory, with contributions to knot theory, character varieties, PSL(2,C) representations of knot groups, Mahler measures in number fields, equidistribution, and class groups. She has published extensively in leading journals, including "Minimal Mahler Measure in Quartic Galois Number Fields" (with B. Paudel and H. Wang, 2025), "Geometric structures and PSL(2,C) representations of knot groups from knot diagrams" (with A. Tsvietkova, 2025), "Symmetries and Surfaces Detected by the Character Variety" (with J. Leach, 2019), "Small PSL(2,F) representations of Seifert Fiber Space Groups" (with N. Hoffman, 2022), "Equidistribution of Elements of Norm One in Cyclic Extensions" (with C. D. Sinclair, Publ. Math. Debrecen, 2023), "Partitions Associated to Class Groups of Imaginary Quadratic Number Fields" (with J. Sellers, Aequationes Mathematicae, 2023), "Minimal Mahler Measure in Cubic Number Fields" (with L. Eldredge, Int. J. Number Theory, 2022), "Gonality and Genus of Canonical Components of Character Varieties" (with A. Reid, Contemp. Math., 2020), "A Bombieri-Vinogradov Theorem for All Number Fields" (with M. R. Murty, Trans. Amer. Math. Soc., 2013), and "Character Varieties of a Family of Two-Bridge Knots" (with M. Macasieb and R. van Luijk, Proc. London Math. Soc., 2011). She has supervised students, including PhD student Lydia Eldredge, who completed her doctorate in 2020 at Florida State University. Petersen engages the mathematical community by organizing conferences such as Number Theory and Combinatorics in Duluth, co-organizing the WAMS school on low-dimensional topology, participating in Association for Women in Mathematics panels like "Celebrating Academic Pivots in Mathematics," and delivering invited colloquia including "Decision Problems in Low-Dimensional Topology" at Claremont McKenna College and talks on triangulations and trace fields at Rutgers University. As Department Head, she holds office hours Mondays 1-2 p.m. and Wednesdays 3-4 p.m., or by appointment.