7th Annual Women in Mathematics Day

10-24-2013

The Department of Mathematics celebrated the achievements and contributions of women mathematicians on November 12, 2013. Irene Fonseca, Mellon College of Science Professor of Mathematics at Carnegie Mellon University, was the featured guest speaker. She delivered the Jean E. Rubin Memorial Lecture* at 4:30 p.m. in MATH 175, entitled "Variational Methods in Materials and Image Processing."

Professor Fonseca's work combines research, teaching, and training at the interface between pure and applied analysis. Since 1998, she has been the Director of the (NSF funded) Center for Nonlinear Analysis in the CMU Department of Mathematical Sciences; its primary focus is research and training in applied mathematics at the broad interface between mathematics, the physical sciences, and engineering. Her research program includes the mathematical study of shape memory alloys, ferroelectric magnetic materials, composites, liquid crystals, thin structures, phase transitions, and image segmentation and recolorization in computer vision.

Irene Fonseca received her undergraduate education at the University of Lisbon and her M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. She is the current President of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). In 2006 she was the Sonia Kovalevsky Lecturer at the annual AWM-SIAM meeting, and she has received numerous recognitions from the profession, from Carnegie Mellon, and from her native Portugal. She is a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) and a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society (AMS).

Women in Mathematics Day activities provide special opportunities for women faculty and graduate students to share experiences and discuss issues of access and climate. Support this year was provided by the Purdue Department of Mathematics and a grant from the Science Women for Purdue Giving Circle. For additional information, contact Professor Donatella Danielli.

*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 the University of Oregon and Michigan State University 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.