5th Annual Celebration of Women in Mathematics

10-03-2011

Professor Ruth Williams of the University of California, San Diego, was the featured guest speaker for the department's 5th annual Women in Mathematics Day on November 1, 2011. She gave the Jean E. Rubin Memorial Lecture at 4:30 p.m. in MATH 175.

Organized by Purdue professor Donatella Danielli, Women in Mathematics Day included a luncheon and opportunities for faculty and students in mathematics and related fields to meet with Professor Williams.

Ruth Williams is the Charles Lee Powell Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at San Diego. She is a world expert in probability and its applications to stochastic networks that arise in many areas of science and engineering. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, and a Presidential Young Investigator's Award. She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and a fellow of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences. In 2009, she was elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She was an invited speaker at the 1998 Congress of Mathematicians in Berlin. She is the current president of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.

Women in Mathematics Day was supported by the Purdue Department of Mathematics, Purdue Women in Academia, and a grant from the Science Women for Purdue Giving Circle.

*Jean E. Rubin was Professor of Mathematics at Purdue University from 1967 until her death in 2002. She received a B.S. from Queen's College in New York City in 1948, an M.A. from Columbia in 1949, and a Ph.D. from Stanford in 1955. She taught at Oregon and Michigan State before coming to Purdue. Professor Rubin was the author of more than 40 papers and five books in set theory and questions related to the axiom of choice.