Hinke Osinga


Hinke Maria Osinga is a Dutch mathematician and an expert in dynamical systems. She works as a professor of applied mathematics at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. As well as for her research, she is known as a creator of mathematical art.

Education and career

Osinga earned a master's degree in 1991 and a Ph.D. in 1996 from the University of Groningen. Her doctoral dissertation, jointly supervised by dynamical systems theorist Hendrik Broer and computational geometer Gert Vegter, was on the computation of invariant manifolds.
After postdoctoral studies at The Geometry Center and the California Institute of Technology, and a short-term lecturership at the University of Exeter, she became a lecturer at the University of Bristol in 2001, and was promoted to reader and professor there in 2005 and 2011, respectively. She moved to Auckland in 2011, becoming the first female mathematics professor at Auckland and the second in New Zealand.

Mathematical art

In 2004 Osinga created a crocheted visualization of the Lorenz manifold, an invariant manifold for the Lorenz system, and published the crochet pattern for her work with her husband Bernd Krauskopf; the resulting mathematical textile artwork involved over 25,000 crochet stitches, and measured nearly a meter across. Osinga and Krauskopf later collaborated with artist Benjamin Storch on a stainless steel sculpture that provides another interpretation of the same mathematical system.

Awards and honours

Osinga was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2014, speaking on "Mathematics in Science and Technology". In 2015 she was elected as a fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics "for contributions to theory and computational methods for dynamical systems." in October 2016 she became the first female mathematician elected to the Royal Society of New Zealand.