Marissa Loving

Marissa Kawehi Loving is an American theoretical mathematician. In 2022, she joined the University of Wisconsin-Madison as the Assistant Professor of Mathematics. Loving, who is both native Hawai'ian and Black, was the first woman faculty member from a historically excluded racial group in mathematics to receive tenure-track in the department.

Loving's research interests include geometric group theory, low-dimensional topology and mapping class groups of finite and infinite surfaces. Her mother Theresa Loving (née Prowell) was from Pennsylvania and her father, Floyd Carleton Loving lll, was a middle-school mathematics teacher from O'ahu. Loving is the eldest of 11 siblings.

Loving graduated from the University of Hawai'i in 2013 with a Bachelor of Science in computer science and a Bachelor of Arts in mathematics. She, alongside Field, Autumn Kent, and Leininger, devised "a framework to prove volume estimates for closed hyperbolic 3-manifolds with depth-one foliations."

Loving's work also involves big mapping class groups, in particular those arising from infinite-type surfaces. Using geometric group theory techniques, she and Justin Lanier demonstrated that subgroup structures of infinite-type surfaces have trivial centers and that every non-trivial normal subgroup contains a non-abelian free group.

Other engagements In 2019, Loving and fellow mathematician Justin Lanier founded SUBgroups, a network of online support groups, to help first-year math graduate students to connect with their peers in order to share their experiences, uplift each other, and find a mathematical community beyond their academic program. She also cofounded paraDIGMS (Diversity in Graduate Mathematical Sciences) to provide resources, support, and collaboration opportunities to a professional community of graduate directors, graduate committee members, department chairs, and faculty. She coordinates the activities for paraDIGMS alongside Lanier, Matthew Ando (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) and Bianca Viray (University of Washington).

Loving serves on the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences' Indigenous Engagement Committee, which supports Indigenous-led efforts in education and research in the mathematical sciences. She is the cofounder of Indigenous Mathematicians, a web platform that recognizes indigenous people in mathematics.

Publications

Journal articles