Jessica Purcell

American mathematician

Jessica A. Shepherd Purcell is an American mathematician specializing in low-dimensional topology whose research topics have included hyperbolic Dehn surgery and the Jones polynomial. She is a professor of mathematics at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.[1]

## Education

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Purcell credits a high school mathematics teacher, Mr. Pehrson, for her interest in mathematics.[2] She majored in mathematics as an undergraduate at the University of Utah, with a minor in computer science. She was a co-winner of the 1998 Alice T. Schafer Prize for Excellence in Mathematics by an Undergraduate Woman of the Association for Women in Mathematics,[3][4] and graduated summa cum laude in 1998.[1]

After earning a master's degree in mathematics at the University of Michigan in 1999,[1] Purcell completed her Ph.D. at Stanford University in 2004. Her dissertation, Cusp Shapes of Hyperbolic Link Complements and Dehn Filling, was supervised by Steven Kerckhoff.[1][5]

## Career

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After postdoctoral research at the University of Texas at Austin and University of Oxford, Purcell became an assistant professor at Brigham Young University in 2007.[1] She was named a Sloan Research Fellow in 2011,[1][6] and earned tenure at Brigham Young in 2013. After visits to Monash University and at the Institute for Advanced Study as a Von Neumann Fellow, she moved to Monash as an associate professor in 2015, became an ARC Future Fellow in 2017, and was named full professor in 2019.[1]

She chaired the Women in Mathematics Special Interest Group of the Australian Mathematical Society for 2018–2019 and 2019–2020.[7]

Purcell was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in May 2025.[8]

## Books

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Purcell is the author of the book Hyperbolic Knot Theory (Graduate Studies in Mathematics 209, American Mathematical Society, 2020).[9] With David Futer and Efstratia Kalfagianni she is a coauthor of Guts of Surfaces and the Colored Jones Polynomial (Lecture Notes in Mathematics 2069, Springer, 2012).[10]

## References

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1. ^ a b c d e f g Curriculum vitae (PDF), Monash University, retrieved 2021-03-14
2. ^ Purcell, Jessica, Biography: Some frequently asked questions, Brigham Young University, retrieved 2021-03-14
3. ^ Alice T. Schafer Prize for Excellence in Mathematics by an Undergraduate Woman 1998, Association for Women in Mathematics, retrieved 2021-03-14
4. ^ Gallian, Joseph A. (June–July 2019), "The First Twenty-Five Winners of the AWM Alice T. Schafer Prize" (PDF), Notices of the American Mathematical Society, 66 (6): 870–874, doi:10.1090/noti1892
5. ^ Jessica Purcell at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
6. ^ "Math Professor Jessica Purcell Wins Prestigious Fellowship", BYU News, Brigham Young University, 23 February 2011, archived from the original on 2016-07-09, retrieved 2021-03-14
7. ^ Past WIMSIG executive committees, Australian Mathematical Society, retrieved 2021-03-14
8. ^ "Jessica Purcell". Australian Academy of Science. Retrieved 2025-05-26.
9. ^ Reviews of Hyperbolic Knot Theory: Henry Segerman, MAA Reviews; Luisa Paoluzzi, Zbl 1480.57002; Kazushi Ahara, MR4249621
10. ^ Reviews of Guts of Surfaces and the Colored Jones Polynomial: Heather A. Dye, MR3024600; Daniel Moskovich, Zbl 1270.57002

## External links

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* Home page
* Jessica Purcell publications indexed by Google Scholar
* Meet Professor Jessica Purcell, Monash University

Authority control databases

International|

* VIAF
* WorldCat

National|

* Germany

Academics|

* Mathematics Genealogy Project
* zbMATH
* MathSciNet