Work and Research
For the last 30 years McDuff has been a contributor to the development of the field of symplectic geometry and topology. Her work has helped ensure that symplectic geometry is now at the forefront of modern mathematics. She gave the first example of symplectic forms on a closed manifold that are cohomologous but not diffeomorphic and also classified of rational and ruled symplectic four-manifolds, completed with Francois Lalonde. More recently, partly in collaboration with Susan Tolman, she has pioneered applications of powerful methods of ‘hard’ symplectic topology to the theory of Hamiltonian torus actions. She has also worked on embedding capacities of 4-dimensional symplectic ellipsoids with Felix Schlenk, which gives rise to some very interesting number-theoretical questions. It also indicates a connection between the combinatorics of J-holomorphic curves in the blow up of the projective plane and the numbers that appear as indices in embedded contact homology.
Read more about this topic: Dusa Mc Duff
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