Krystal Taylor is a shining testament to what talent and
determination working together can do. Krystal walked into my office
at the University of Missouri in 2006 and made it very clear that
she wants to become a successful research mathematician. After
ripping through the preliminary exams where she outscored the vast
majority of students who often had a much more extensive
undergraduate mathematics background, Krystal wrote a very
interesting PH.D. dissertation on the applications of Generalized
Radon transform methods to problems in geometric measure theory and
lattice point counting. She moved with me to the University of
Rochester in 2010 and became my first PH.D. student at UR.
My collaboration with Krystal continues to this day. In
collaboration with Mihalis Mourgoglou we created a direct and simple
approach to the study of distance sets that contain intervals. This
line of research continued in collaboration with Allan Greenleaf. It
has been very rewarding to observe Krystal develop as a
mathematician over the years, from her postdoctoral days at the
Technion to the tenured position at Ohio State University where she
has excelled in every aspect of academic life.