Loving was born in O'ahu, Hawaiʻi and raised in Honomū. In addition to being a Native Hawaiʻian, she is also Black, Puerto Rican, and Japanese. 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. She was homeschooled, and was more interested in pursuing writing, instead of STEM, as a career. She wanted to be a journalist or a playwright, but decided to study computer science at the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo, where she was a presidential scholar.
Loving graduated from the University of Hawaiʻi in 2013 with a Bachelor of Science in computer science and a Bachelor of Arts in mathematics. She earned a doctorate degree in mathematics from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2019, during which she received the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and an Illinois Graduate College Distinguished Fellowship.
She was the first Native Hawaiian woman to earn a PhD in mathematics. For the next three years, she was NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellow and Hale Assistant Professor at Georgia Tech. In 2022, she joined University of Wisconsin-Madison as an Assistant Professor on a tenure-track position and earned the Nellie Y. McKay Fellowship. Loving is the first woman from a historically excluded racial group in mathematics to be appointed as a tenure-track faculty member in the department.
Research
Loving' contributions in the field of low-dimensional topology focus on end-periodic mapping tori (sing. torus) to understand the hyperbolic volumes and geometric invariants that inform broader manifold classification. In particular, she links surface dynamics to 3-dimensional hyperbolic geometry by establishing the bounds on volumes for the tori. Building on the work of Ian Agol and Jeffrey Brock on hyperbolic 3-manifolds in the finite-type setting, Loving worked with Elizabeth Field, Heejoung Kim, and Chris Leininger to construct and subsequently use "a broad class of examples of irreducible, end-periodic homeomorphisms" to show an asymptotically sharp bound. 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.
↑Lanier, Justin; Loving, Marissa (2019-04-22). "Centers of subgroups of big mapping class groups and the Tits alternative". arXiv:1904.10060 [math.GT].
