Stephanie B. Alexander

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Stephanie Brewster Brewer Taylor Alexander (September 1, 1941 – November 20, 2023) was an American mathematician and professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Her work focused on differential geometry and metric spaces. She was born in Los Angeles and grew up in Vancouver, Canada, and London, Ontario. Alexander studied at Mount Holyoke College and earned her Ph.D. from UIUC in 1967, supervised by Richard L. Bishop; her thesis was Reducibility of Euclidean Immersions of Low Codimensions. She joined UIUC as a half-time instructor and became a regular faculty member in 1972. She retired in 2009 and died in 2023. Her most important achievements were in the study of metric spaces with curvature bounds. Together with Bishop, she helped develop a concept of curvature bounds in the style of Alexandrov geometry for semi-Riemannian and Lorentzian manifolds, an early step toward synthetic geometry in a Lorentzian setting.