Krystyna Kuperberg

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,[2][3] while her daughter Anna Kuperberg is a photographer.[3][4]

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.[2][3]

After obtaining her undergraduate degree, Kuperberg began graduate studies at Warsaw under Borsuk, but stopped after earning a master's degree.[2][3] She left Poland in 1969 with her young family to live in Sweden, then moved to the United States in 1972.[1][2][3] She finished her Ph.D. in 1974, from Rice University, under the supervision of William Jaco.[2][5][3] In the same year, both she and her husband were appointed to the faculty of Auburn University.[2][3] From 1996 to 1998, Kuperberg served as an American Mathematical Society Council member at large.[6]

In 1987 she solved a problem of Bronisław Knaster concerning bi-homogeneity of continua.[2][3] In the 1980s she became interested in fixed points and topological aspects of dynamical systems. In 1989 Kuperberg and Coke Reed solved a problem posed by Stan Ulam in the Scottish Book.[7] The solution to that problem led to her 1993 work in which she constructed a smooth counterexample to the Seifert conjecture.[1][2][3] She has since continued to work in dynamical systems.[3]

In 1995 Kuperberg received the Alfred Jurzykowski Prize from the Kościuszko Foundation.[2][3] Her major lectures include an American Mathematical Society Plenary Lecture in March 1995, a Mathematical Association of America Plenary Lecture in January 1996, and an International Congress of Mathematicians invited talk in 1998.[1][8] In 2012 she became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.[9]

• Kuperberg, Krystyna (1994). "A smooth counterexample to the Seifert conjecture". Annals of Mathematics. (2). 140 (3): 723–732. doi:10.2307/2118623. JSTOR 2118623. MR 1307902.
• Kuperberg, Greg; Kuperberg, Krystyna (1996). "Generalized counterexamples to the Seifert conjecture". Annals of Mathematics. (2). 143 (3): 547–576. arXiv:math/9802040. doi:10.2307/2118536. JSTOR 2118536. MR 1394969. S2CID 16309410.