Stephanie Brewster Brewer Taylor Alexander (September 1, 1941 – November 20, 2023)[1] was an American mathematician, a professor of mathematics at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.[2] Her research concerned differential geometry and metric spaces.[3]
Alexander was born in Los Angeles and raised in Vancouver, British Colombia, and London, Ontario. She was a graduate of Mount Holyoke College.
She earned her Ph.D. from UIUC in 1967, under the supervision of Richard L. Bishop, with a thesis entitled Reducibility of Euclidean Immersions of Low Codimensions. After joining the UIUC faculty as a half-time instructor, she became a regular faculty member in 1972. She retired in 2009 and died in 2023.[4]
Alexander's most significant achievements were in relation to the study of metric spaces with curvature bounds. Of particular importance was her work with Bishop to establish a concept of curvature bounds in the style of Alexandrov geometry for semi-Riemannian manifolds and Lorentzian manifolds, an early step towards the development of synthetic geometry in a Lorentzian setting.