Abigail Thompson

[2] Thompson graduated from Wellesley College in 1979,[1] and earned her Ph.D. in 1986 from Rutgers University under the joint supervision of Martin Scharlemann and Julius L.

[8] Thompson won the 2003 Ruth Lyttle Satter Prize in Mathematics for her research on thin position and Heegard splittings.

[9] In February 2020, Thompson was recognized by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) as a "Hero of Intellectual Freedom".

[10][11] The award is due to an op-ed Thompson published in The Wall Street Journal on December 19, 2019, denouncing the use of mandatory diversity statements in faculty hiring practices in the University of California system.

[11] In December 2019, she published a similar opinion piece under the heading "A word from... Abigail Thompson" in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society,[13] of which she was one of the Vice Presidents at the time.