Julia Wolf is a British mathematician specialising in arithmetic combinatorics who was the 2016 winner of the Anne Bennett Prize of the London Mathematical Society. [1] [2] She is currently a professor in the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics at the University of Cambridge. [3]
Wolf writes that her childhood ambition was to become a carpenter, and that she became attracted to science only after subscribing to Scientific American as a teenager. [4]
She read mathematics at Clare College, Cambridge, completing the Mathematical Tripos in 2003. [3] She remained at Cambridge for graduate study, and completed her PhD there in 2008. Her dissertation, Arithmetic Structure in Sets of Integers, was supervised by Timothy Gowers. [3] [5] She was also mentored in her doctoral studies by Ben Green, whom she met when he was a postdoctoral researcher at Cambridge from 2001 to 2005. [6]
Since earning her doctorate she has been a postdoctoral fellow at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, California, Triennial assistant professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey, Hadamard associate professor at the École Polytechnique in Paris (earning a habilitation at the University of Paris-Sud in 2012), and Heilbronn reader in combinatorics and number theory at the University of Bristol. [3] She returned to Cambridge as a university lecturer in 2018, [3] [7] and was a Fellow of Clare College from 2018 to 2022. [3]
In 2016 the London Mathematical Society gave Wolf their Anne Bennett Prize "in recognition of her outstanding contributions to additive number theory, combinatorics and harmonic analysis and to the mathematical community." [1] [2] The award citation particularly cited her work with Gowers on counting solutions to systems of linear equations over abelian groups, and her work on quadratic analogues of the Goldreich–Levin theorem. [2]