Dr. Kathryn McCormick, February 2026 Snapshot
Dr. Kathryn McCormick, an Assistant Professor in the Mathematics and Statistics Department, and her students work with theoretical mathematics research in operator algebras. If you've taken a high school science class, you've probably been exposed a little to what research looks like in the lab sciences, but most people don't have a picture in their heads of what theoretical mathematics research is (or even know that it exists).
Mathematicians try to understand the common structures that appear across a variety of scientific areas, so that we can solve multiple problems at once. For example, there may be multiple situations that share similarities to a ball being hit by a cue stick and moving around a pool table, and by studying a generalized version of this problem, we can answer all problems at once. Dr. McCormick's work with C* algebras takes this one step further to help analyze a generic problem that arises in quantum mechanics, wavelets, and signal processing among other areas. These areas of science in turn can lead to results such as better communication systems.
I find my area of mathematics research (operator algebras, and functional analysis as a whole) fun because of the variety it offers. It combines a lot of different areas of math (analysis, algebra, topology, dynamical systems, etc.) and so I'm always getting to play with new 'tools.'
Dr. Kathryn McCormick
