The London Mathematical Society is pleased to announce Caroline Series FRS, Emeritus Professor, University of Warwick, as President-Designate. Professor Series will take over from the current President, Professor Simon Tavaré, FRS, FMedSci, in November 2017. Professor Series is known for her leading contributions to hyperbolic geometry and dynamical systems, and for her many contributions to the mathematical community.
She obtained her PhD from Harvard University in 1976 under George W. Mackey. From 1978 she has been at the University of Warwick, where in 1992 she became the first female professor of pure mathematics in the UK. She held an EPSRC Senior Research Fellowship 1999-2004.
Her research concerns intricate and fundamental questions about the geometry of hyperbolic surfaces and 3-manifolds. In 1987 she was awarded the LMS Junior Whitehead prize for her work on symbolic dynamics of geodesics on hyperbolic surfaces, in modern language, showing that the fundamental group of a surface is automatic. She and others have found many applications of this machinery: to simple geodesics, Diophantine approximation, and dynamical systems. Turning to three-dimensional hyperbolic geometry, she adapted techniques from the Thurston school to develop an original theory which allows one to solve difficult questions about computing parameter spaces of Kleinian groups. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2016.
Besides groundbreaking research, Caroline has contributed extensively to the mathematical community both nationally and internationally. She was a member of the RAE Pure Mathematics sub-panel (2008) and the REF Mathematical Science Panel (2014). She has been on both the Scientific and Management Committees of the Isaac Newton Institute, and is a Fellow of the AMS and the IMA.
Throughout her career, Caroline has been involved in the work of the LMS: as Council Member at Large, IMU Representative, Chief Editor of the LMS Student Texts, BMC Committee Representative, and most recently as Chair of the LMS Nominating Committee. She was the LMS Forder lecturer in New Zealand in 2003.
Caroline has a long record in encouraging women mathematicians, from being a founder member of European Women in Mathematics in 1986 to her current role as Vice Chair of the IMU Committee for Women in Mathematics. In recognition of her mathematics and this work, in 2014 she became the first recipient of the Senior Anne Bennett Prize of the LMS.
Caroline is also well known for communicating her research to wider audiences, notably in the elegant book Indra’s Pearls. She has presented many public lectures including the LMS’s Popular Lectures and its Gresham lecture. She was President of the Mathematical Section of the British Science Association in 2011. She is one of the interviewees in the LMS film Thinking Space, which was produced as part of the Society’s 150th Anniversary celebrations in 2015.