Research

Ursula Hamenstädt achieved important contributions in geometry which were mainly carried out at the Mathematisches Institut der Universität Bonn. She worked on geometric dynamical systems, geometric diffusions, geometric analysis and geometric topology. Her work on geometric group theory mainly focusses on the geometry of the mapping class group of a surface and the outer automorphism group of the free group. She developed a new geometric model for the mapping class group of a surface and used this model for deep structural insights. She also obtained a new approach for the understanding of dynamical properties of the moduli space of abelian and quadratic differentials of surfaces that could be used to solve some important open problems in this area.