| Yael Karshon | |
| Birth Date: | 1964 |
| Nationality: | Israeli, Canadian |
| Fields: | Mathematics |
| Workplaces: | University of Toronto Mississauga, Tel Aviv University |
| Alma Mater: | Harvard University |
| Doctoral Advisor: | Shlomo Sternberg |
| Known For: | Symplectic geometry |
| Awards: | Krieger–Nelson Prize (2008) |
Yael Karshon (born 1964) is an Israeli and Canadian mathematician who has been described as "one of Canada's leading experts in symplectic geometry".She works as a professor at the University of Toronto Mississauga and Tel Aviv University .
Karshon took part in the 1982 International Mathematical Olympiad, on the Israeli team.She earned her Ph.D. in 1993 from Harvard University under the supervision of Shlomo Sternberg.
After working as a C. L. E. Moore instructor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and then earning tenure at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, she moved to the University of Toronto Mississauga in 2002.
Karshon is the author of the monographs Periodic Hamiltonian flows on four dimensional manifolds (Memoirs of the American Mathematical Society 672, 1999), which completely classified the Hamiltonian actions of the circle group on four-dimensional compact manifolds. With Viktor Ginzburg and Victor Guillemin, she also wrote Moment maps, cobordisms, and Hamiltonian group actions (Mathematical Surveys and Monographs 98, American Mathematical Society, 2002), which surveys "symplectic geometry in the context of equivariant cobordism".
Karshon won the Krieger–Nelson Prize in 2008.
Karshon is from Israel, and lived in the US for ten years, eventually becoming a permanent resident. She took Canadian citizenship in 2011.From her marriage to mathematician Dror Bar-Natan she has two sons.