Krystyna Kuperberg

Who is Krystyna Kuperberg?

Krystyna M. Kuperberg is a Polish-American mathematician who currently works at Auburn University.

Her parents, Jan W. and Barbara H. Trybulec, were pharmacists and owned a pharmacy in Tarnów. Her older brother is Andrzej Trybulec. 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 Gdańsk, she entered the University of Warsaw in 1962, where she studied mathematics. Her 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.