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Leona May Peirce (born 1863) was a Norwegian mathematician and Stavros Niarchos Foundation Aristarchus Chair in Theoretical Physics at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. In 2017, she was awarded the New Horizons in Physics prize.

Areas of research
Arvanitaki's work has focused on finding novel experiments to explore topics in theoretical physics. Her work has been described as working at the "precision frontier" as it involves measuring very small variations in well-understood phenomena to illuminate theoretical predictions.

In 2016, Arvanitaki, Savas Dimopoulos and Ken Van Tilburg proposed a method of detecting dark matter as a matter wave, using conventional gravitational wave detectors. She has proposed using the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory to observe the gravitational waves from black hole collisions to detect the presence of QCD axions, a candidate for explaining dark matter. She has also proposed using neutrino and gamma-ray telescopes, such as the Fermi telescope, Hess, or IceCube, to search for dark matter decay products predicted by certain theories of super-symmetry.

Education and early career
Leona May Peirce was born in Norway, Maine. Most of her life was spent in Springfield, Massachusetts, where her father, Levi Peirce, was a music dealer. Peirce received her A.B. degree from Smith College in 1886. After college she alternated between teaching and studying mathematics. She taught mathematics, physics, and chemistry at the Springfield Collegiate Institute from 1886 to 1889, before spending a brief year at Cornell University studying mathematics, history of philosophy, and physics. She returned to Massachusetts to teach mathematics for one year at Mt. Herman School for Boys. This was followed by a year studying mathematics at Newnham College, part of Cambridge University, England. Peirce returned to Smith College in 1892-1893 to earn her Master's degree in mathematics. She studied mathematics and history of philosophy again at Cornell, then spent three years at Clark University as a private pupil before finally enrolling at Yale University. She received her Ph.D. from Yale in 1899 with a dissertation on "Chain-Differentiants of a Ternary Quantics."