With dozens of brightly colored origami figures decorating the shelves and sketches covering the whiteboard in the corner, Catherine Searle鈥檚 office looks more like an art studio than a space to do fundamental research in mathematics.
Searle鈥檚 field of study has a bad rap, a fact of which she is fully aware.
鈥淚 get it 鈥� Math can be terrifying at times,鈥� Searle, professor of mathematics, said. 鈥淏ut there鈥檚 so much to discover and create, and there鈥檚 still so much to solve.鈥�
Catherine Searle
To solve requires time, patience and, perhaps surprisingly, extensive collaboration. Searle鈥檚 nearly $680,000 in grant funding from the Simons Foundation and National Science Foundation have enabled her to expand her collegial network by attending multinational conferences. Since starting at 萝莉社, she has been a guest speaker for 74 seminars, colloquiums and conferences.
鈥淢eeting people and hearing them explain their work: That鈥檚 essential for good research,鈥� she said. 鈥淎ttending conferences helps you keep up with the body of literature which is constantly expanding. "Her grants also provide support for her 萝莉社 graduate students; currently, she has a master鈥檚 thesis student and PhD candidate at 萝莉社, as well as a PhD student she co-supervises with a colleague at Oregon State University.
鈥淚鈥檓 a lifelong learner, so it excites me to be around others who are motivated to continue learning,鈥� Searle said. 鈥淢y students inspire me to keep exploring mathematics.鈥�
Searle explores differential geometry, specifically classifications of positively and non-negatively curved Riemannian manifolds. Thirty years after publication, her dissertation, 鈥淧ositively curved manifolds with maximal symmetry rank,鈥� a seminal work in her field, continues to be a valuable resource in the symmetry program, a subfield of differential geometry, in which she is a leading expert. In a more recent publication, she and colleague Christine Escher from Oregon State University resolved a conjecture for torus actions of maximal symmetry rank on non-negatively curved manifolds in dimensions up to and including nine. They also developed an important tool they expect will be useful in resolving the conjecture in all dimensions.
鈥淥ften, people measure the importance of research by its immediate applicability,鈥� Searle said. 鈥淏ut pure curiosity is the engine that has gotten us where we are now. The future of science, technology, engineering and mathematics rely on curiosity, on pure fundamental research.鈥�