Krystyna M. Kuperberg (born 17 July 1944 in Tarnów, Poland) is a Polish-American mathematician, currently at Auburn University.

Krystyna Kuperberg was born Krystyna M. Trybulec. Her parents, Jan W. and Barbara H. Trybulec, were pharmacists and owned a pharmacy in Tarnow. Her older brother Andrzej Trybulec was also interested in mathematics, as well as philosophy and later computer science. Her husband Włodzimierz Kuperberg and her son Greg Kuperberg are also mathematicians, while her daughter Anna Kuperberg is a photographer.

After attending high school in Gdansk, she entered the University of Warsaw in 1962. She chose a philosophy track but later switched to mathematics. Here first mathematics course was taught by Andrzej Mostowski; later she attended topology lectures of Karol Borsuk and became fascinated by topology.

After obtaining her undergraduate degree, Kuperberg began graduate studies at Warsaw under Borsuk. For many years she worked primarily in topology, with some interest in Euclidean geometry. She left Poland in 1969 with her family to live in Sweden, then moved to the United States in 1972.

In 1987 she solved a problem of Knaster concerning bi-homogeneity of continua. In the 1980s she became interested in fixed points and topological aspects of dynamical systems. In 1993, she constructed a smooth counterexample to the Seifert conjecture. She has since continued to work in dynamical systems.

In 1995 Kuperberg received the Alfred Jurzykowski Award from the Kosciuszko Foundation. Her major lectures include an AMS Plenary Lecture in March 1995, an MAA Plenary Lecture in January 1996, and an ICM invited talk in 1998.

External links

MacTutor biography (http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Kuperberg.html)