Jennifer Denise Key (née Hicks) is a retired South African mathematician whose research has concerned the interconnections between group theory, finite geometry, combinatorial designs, and coding theory.
[1] She is a professor emeritus at Clemson University in the US,[2] and an honorary professor at Aberystwyth University in the UK,[3] and the University of KwaZulu-Natal and University of the Western Cape in South Africa.
[1] Key graduated with honours from the University of the Witwatersrand in 1963, and went to the University of London for graduate study in mathematics, earning a master's degree in 1967 and completing her Ph.D. in 1969.
[2] Her dissertation, Some Topics in Finite Permutation Groups, was supervised by Ascher Wagner.
[1] Key is the author, with Edward F. Assmus Jr., of the book Designs and Their Codes (Cambridge University Press, 1992).