Alissa Crans

Last updated
Alissa Susan Crans
Dye Niebrzydowski Crans Sazdanovic Jacobsson Asaeda Sikora King Mroczkowski Manturov Chmutov 2008 MFO10676.jpg
Alissa Crans (3rd from left) at the 2008 MFO workshop Invariants in Low-Dimensional Topology
NationalityAmerican
Alma materUniversity of Redlands
Scientific career
FieldsMathematics
InstitutionsPomona College
Loyola Marymount University

Alissa Susan Crans is an American mathematician specializing in higher-dimensional algebra. She is a professor of mathematics at Loyola Marymount University, and the associate director of Project NExT, a program of the Mathematical Association of America to mentor post-doctoral mathematicians, statisticians, and mathematics teachers. [1]

Contents

Education and career

Crans graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Redlands in 1999. She earned an M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Riverside in 2000 and 2004 respectively. [1] Her dissertation, Lie 2-Algebras, was supervised by John C. Baez. [1] [2]

She worked as a lecturer at Pomona College in 2002, as VIGRE Ross Assistant Professor at Ohio State University from 2005 to 2006, and as Visiting Dickson Instructor at the University of Chicago in 2008. Meanwhile she started as an assistant professor at Loyola Marymount University in 2004, and was promoted to full professor there in 2016, with another leave to work as Associate Director of Diversity and Education at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute from 2012 to 2014. [1]

She took up her position as associate director of Project NExT in 2014. [1] She is also active as a mentor for women in mathematics, [3] and served as member-at-large on the executive committee of the Association for Women in Mathematics from 2014 to 2018. [1]

Recognition

Diamond Bar High School lists Crans among their Distinguished Alumni. [3] In 2011 the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) gave Crans their Henry L. Alder Award [4] for Distinguished Teaching by a Beginning College/University Mathematics Faculty Member. In the same year she also won the Merten M. Hasse Prize of the MAA for her paper "Musical Actions of Dihedral Groups". [5] She was an MAA Distinguished Lecturer in 2014, speaking about the Catalan numbers. [6] The Association for Women in Mathematics has included her in the 2020 class of AWM Fellows for "mentoring and supporting women at Loyola Marymount and through EDGE, SMP, SPWM, and Project NExT; for her role in the Pacific Coast Undergraduate Mathematics Conference, recognized as an AMS Program That Makes a Difference". [7] She is included in a deck of playing cards featuring notable women mathematicians published by the Association of Women in Mathematics. [8]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lenore Blum</span> USA computer scientist and mathematician

Lenore Carol Blum is an American computer scientist and mathematician who has made contributions to the theories of real number computation, cryptography, and pseudorandom number generation. She was a distinguished career professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University until 2019 and is currently a professor in residence at the University of California, Berkeley. She is also known for her efforts to increase diversity in mathematics and computer science.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chuu-Lian Terng</span> Taiwanese-American mathematician

Chuu-Lian Terng is a Taiwanese-American mathematician. Her research areas are differential geometry and integrable systems, with particular interests in completely integrable Hamiltonian partial differential equations and their relations to differential geometry, the geometry and topology of submanifolds in symmetric spaces, and the geometry of isometric actions.

MAA Project NExT is a program sponsored by the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) to aid in the professional development of mathematicians, statisticians, and mathematics educators after they receive their PhDs. It involves workshops and lectures on teaching, academic research, academic scholarship, and professional activities. The participants in the program are called Project NExT Fellows or sometimes Dots, and the program also provides ample networking opportunities for them. Each fellow is also provided with a consultant, who serves as a mentor for them.

Audrey Anne Terras is an American mathematician who works primarily in number theory. Her research has focused on quantum chaos and on various types of zeta functions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jennifer Quinn</span> American mathematician

Jennifer J. Quinn is an American mathematician specializing in combinatorics, and professor of mathematics at the University of Washington Tacoma. She sits on the board of governors of the Mathematical Association of America, and is serving as its president for the years 2021 and 2022. From 2004 to 2008 she was co-editor of Math Horizons.

Sylvia D. Trimble Bozeman is an American mathematician and Mathematics educator.

Aparna W. Higgins is a mathematician known for her encouragement of undergraduate mathematicians to participate in mathematical research. Higgins originally specialized in universal algebra, but her more recent research concerns graph theory, including graph pebbling and line graphs. She is a professor of mathematics at the University of Dayton.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marie A. Vitulli</span> American mathematician

Marie A. Vitulli is an American mathematician and professor emerita at the University of Oregon.

Jacqueline Ann Jensen-Vallin is an American mathematician. She is an associate professor of mathematics at Lamar University, the editor-in-chief of MAA FOCUS, the newsletter of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA), and the governor of the Texas Section of the MAA. Her research interests include combinatorial group theory, low-dimensional topology, and knot theory; she is also known for her work in mathematics education and the history of women in mathematics.

Candice Renee Price is an African-American mathematician and is an Associate professor at Smith College. She, along with Erica Graham, Raegan Higgins, and Shelby Wilson created the website Mathematically Gifted and Black which features the contributions of modern-day black mathematicians. She is an advocate for greater representation of females and people of color in the STEM fields. Price's area of mathematical research is DNA topology.

Jacqueline M. Dewar is an American mathematician and mathematics educator known for her distinguished teaching and her mentorship of women in mathematics. She is a professor emerita of mathematics at Loyola Marymount University.

Sue Geller is an American mathematician and a professor emerita of mathematics at the department of mathematics at Texas A&M University. She is noted for her research background in algebraic K-theory, as well as her interdisciplinary work in bioinformatics and biostatistics, among other disciplines.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sarah J. Greenwald</span> American mathematician

Sarah J. Greenwald is professor of mathematics at Appalachian State University and faculty affiliate of gender, women's and sexuality studies.

Pamela Estephania Harris is a Mexican-American mathematician, educator and advocate for immigrants. She is currently an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was formerly an associate professor at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts and is co-founder of the online platform Lathisms. She is also an editor of the e-mentoring blog of the American Mathematical Society (AMS).

Allison Henrich is an American mathematician specializing in knot theory and also interested in undergraduate-level mathematics research mentorship. She is a professor of mathematics at Seattle University.

Christina Eubanks-Turner is a professor of mathematics in the Seaver College of Science and Engineering at Loyola Marymount University (LMU). Her academic areas of interest include graph theory, commutative algebra, mathematics education, and mathematical sciences diversification. She is also the Director of the Master's Program in Teaching Mathematics at LMU.

The Henry L. Alder Award for Distinguished Teaching is a national award established in 2003 by the Mathematical Association of America. The award is presented to beginning college or university mathematics faculty members to recognize success and effectiveness in undergraduate mathematics education, as well as an impact that extends beyond the faculty member's own classroom. Up to three college or university teachers are recognized each year, receiving a $1,000 award and a certificate of recognition from the MAA.

Hortensia Soto is a Mexican–American mathematics educator, and a professor of mathematics at Colorado State University. In May 2018, she was appointed Associate Secretary of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Selenne Bañuelos</span> American mathematician

Selenne Bañuelos is an American mathematician and associate professor of mathematics at California State University Channel Islands. Her research is in the areas of differential and difference equations and dynamical systems, with a focus on their applications to mathematical biology.

Alicia Prieto Langarica is an American applied mathematician and professor of mathematics at Youngstown State University.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Curriculum vitae (PDF), retrieved 2018-10-29
  2. Alissa Crans at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  3. 1 2 "Alissa Crans (c/o 1995)", Distinguished Alumni, Diamond Bar High School , retrieved 2018-10-29
  4. "Henry L. Alder Award". Mathematical Association of America. Retrieved 2022-12-06.
  5. "MAA Awards Presented" (PDF), Mathematics People, Notices of the American Mathematical Society, 58 (10): 1464, November 2011
  6. "A Surreptitious Sequence: The Catalan Numbers", MAA Distinguished Lecture series, Mathematical Association of America , retrieved 2018-10-29
  7. 2020 Class of AWM Fellows, Association for Women in Mathematics , retrieved 2019-11-08
  8. "Mathematicians of EvenQuads Deck 1". awm-math.org. Retrieved 2022-06-18.