Autumn Kent

Autumn Kent is an American mathematician specializing in topology and geometry. She is a professor of mathematics and Vilas Associate at the University of Wisconsin. She is a transgender woman and a promoter of trans rights.

Education Kent received her B.A. from the University of North Carolina at Asheville in 1999. She earned her Ph.D. under the advising of Cameron McAllan Gordon at the University of Texas at Austin in 2006; her dissertation was entitled Geometry and Algebra of Hyperbolic 3-manifolds. After a four-year position as the Tamarkin Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Brown University,

Kent served on the Policy and Advocacy Committee for the Association for Women in Mathematics from February 2019 through January 2022. In addition, she served on the Association for Women in Mathematics Panel Discussion Promoting Inclusion in STEM at the 2019 Joint Mathematics Meeting. With Harrison Bray, she organized the LG&TBQ+ conference at the University of Michigan to foster collaboration between LGBTQ+ mathematicians working in geometry, topology, and dynamical systems with funding from Kent's NSF Career Award. She gave the Spectra Lavender Lecture at the 2022 Joint Mathematics Meeting.

Recognition In 1999, Kent won the Frank Gerth Dissertation Award. In 2015 and 2016, she was a von Neumann Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study. She was named as a Vilas Associate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison for 2018 and 2019. In 2019, she received a Simons Fellowship.

She was elected as a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society in the 2024 class of fellows.