Emmy Murphy

ThesisLoose Legendrian Embeddings in High Dimensional Contact Manifolds (2012)Doctoral advisorYakov Eliashberg

Emmy Murphy is an American mathematician and a professor at the University of Toronto, Mississauga campus.^[1] Murphy also maintains an office at the Bahen Centre for Information Technology.^[2] Murphy works in the area of symplectic topology, contact geometry and geometric topology. ^[3]

Murphy graduated from the University of Nevada, Reno in 2007,^[3] She completed her doctorate at Stanford University in 2012; her dissertation, Loose Legendrian Embeddings in High Dimensional Contact Manifolds, was supervised by Yakov Eliashberg.^[3][4]

She was a C. L. E. Moore instructor and assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology^[3] before moving in 2016 to Northwestern University, where she became an associate professor of mathematics. She moved to Princeton University in 2021 as a full professor;^[5] and later moved to the University of Toronto in 2023.^[6][1]

Murphy is recognized for her contribution to symplectic and contact geometry. She won the New Horizons in Mathematics Prize in 2020^[7] for "the introduction of notions of loose Legendrian submanifolds"^[8], and "overtwisted contact structures in higher dimensions", which is joint work with Matthew Strom Borman and Yakov Eliashberg^[8].

Murphy was invited to the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2018 and she gave a talk related to some results on h-principle phenomena.^[9] Apart from using h-principle to study the flexibility of local geometric models, Murphy's work uses cut-and-paste/surgery techniques from smooth topology. She also works on exploring the interaction of symplectic/contact topology with geometric invariants, such as those coming from pseudo-holomorphic curves or constructible sheaves^[3].

Murphy received the grants from National Science Foundation for the period 2019–2022 on the topic "Flexible Stein Manifolds and Fukaya Categories". ^[10]

• Von Neumann Fellow, Institute for Advanced Study, 2019–2020.^[3][11]
• New Horizons in Mathematics prize awarded by the Breakthrough Prize Foundation 2020.^[12][8]
• Invited speaker at the 2018 International Congress of Mathematicians.^[13][9]
• Joan & Joseph Birman Research Prize 2017 by the Association for Women in Mathematics.^[14][15]
• AWM Birman Prize 2016 by Royal Academy of Science, Letters and Fine Arts of Belgium.^[3][14]
• Sloan Research Fellowship 2015.

• Loose Legendrian Embeddings in High Dimensional Contact Manifolds
• Klarreich, Erica (March 27, 2023). "Emmy Murphy Is a Mathematician Who Finds Beauty in Flexibility". Quanta Magazine.