Lillian Pierce
Lillian Beatrix Pierce is a mathematician whose research connects number theory with harmonic analysis. She is a professor of mathematics at Duke University.
Early life and education
Pierce was home-schooled in Fallbrook, California and began playing the violin at age four. By age 11 she began performing professionally as a violinist. As a teenager, she also started taking classes at a local community college, accumulating so many units that some of the universities she applied to refused to consider her for freshman admission.She entered Princeton University majoring in mathematics but intending to pursue an MD–PhD program;
under the influence of faculty mentor and undergraduate thesis supervisor Elias M. Stein, her interests shifted towards pure mathematics. As an undergraduate, she also became an intern at the National Security Agency.
She was Princeton's 2002 valedictorian and became a Rhodes Scholar, repeating two accomplishments of her brother Niles Pierce from nine years earlier.
She earned a master's degree at the University of Oxford in 2004. Returning to Princeton for doctoral study in mathematics, she completed her Ph.D. in 2009. Her dissertation, Discrete Analogues in Harmonic Analysis, was supervised by Stein.