Stephanie Alexander

Stephanie Alexander is Professor Emerita in the Mathematics Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with a specialization in differential geometry. She graduated from Mount Holyoke College and received her Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1967, under the supervision of Richard L. Bishop, with a thesis entitled "Reducibility of Euclidean Immersions of Low Codimensions." Following her doctorate, she joined the UIUC Mathematics faculty as a half-time instructor from 1968 to 1971, became a regular faculty member in 1972, advanced to full professor, and retired in 2009. Her academic career at UIUC spanned over four decades, during which she made significant contributions to the field through research, teaching, and mentorship.

Alexander's research interests include differential geometry, global analysis, Riemannian manifolds with boundary, metric geometry of Alexandrov spaces, isometric immersions, and classical geometry. Key publications feature "An Invitation to Alexandrov Geometry: CAT(0) Spaces" (Springer, 2019, co-authored with Vitali Kapovitch and Anton Petrunin), "Alexandrov Geometry: Foundations" (American Mathematical Society, 2024, with Kapovitch and Petrunin), and "Lorentz and semi-Riemannian spaces with Alexandrov curvature bounds" (2008, with Richard L. Bishop). Other notable works include "The Riemannian obstacle problem" (Illinois Journal of Mathematics, 1987, with I. David Berg and Richard L. Bishop) and papers on warped products of Hadamard spaces, comparison theorems for curves of bounded geodesic curvature, and total curvature in pursuit games. She supervised five Ph.D. theses, served as an editor for the Illinois Journal of Mathematics, frequently visited the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques, and led the U.S. team in a cooperative grant with the Steklov Institute in Russia. Her excellence earned the K.-T. Chen Distinguished Mathematical Research Award (2004-2006), the 2014 American Mathematical Society Fellowship for contributions to geometry, exposition, and teaching, and teaching honors including the 1993 Campus and LAS Dean's Awards for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching and the 1986 Alpha Lambda Delta Outstanding Teacher of Freshmen Award.