Annie Laurer Alexander Selden is an expert in mathematics education. She is a professor emeritus at Tennessee Technological University, and an adjunct professor at New Mexico State University. [1] She was one of the original founders of the Association for Women in Mathematics in 1971. [2] [3]
Born as Annie Louise Laurer, she graduated from Oberlin College in 1959, learned to program computers in a summer job at IBM in Endicott, New York, and traveled to the University of Göttingen to study mathematics as a Fulbright scholar. With the support of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, [4] she earned a master's degree from Yale University in 1962. Delayed by marriage and two children, [5] she completed her Ph.D. from Clarkson University in 1974. [1] She published her dissertation, Bisimple ω-semigroups in the locally compact setting, under the name Annie Laurer Alexander. [6] It was supervised by John Selden Jr., [7] whom she later married as her second husband. [5]
Although Selden originally intended to be a research mathematician, the job market at the time of her graduation led her to teach abroad, and the experience of teaching mathematics to non-native English speakers led her to become interested in mathematics education. [5] She taught at the State University of New York at Potsdam, Hampden–Sydney College, Boğaziçi University in Turkey, and Bayero University Kano in Nigeria, before joining Tennessee Technological University in 1985. She retired and moved to New Mexico in 2003. [1]
In 2002, Selden was the winner of the Louise Hay Award of the Association for Women in Mathematics, [5] and the AWM/MAA Falconer Lecturer. [8] She was elected as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2003. [9] The Annie and John Selden Prize of the Mathematical Association of America is named after Selden and her husband. [10]
The Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) is a professional society whose mission is to encourage women and girls to study and to have active careers in the mathematical sciences, and to promote equal opportunity for and the equal treatment of women and girls in the mathematical sciences. The AWM was founded in 1971 and incorporated in the state of Massachusetts. AWM has approximately 5200 members, including over 250 institutional members, such as colleges, universities, institutes, and mathematical societies. It offers numerous programs and workshops to mentor women and girls in the mathematical sciences. Much of AWM's work is supported through federal grants.
Etta Zuber Falconer was an American educator and mathematician the bulk of whose career was spent at Spelman College, where she eventually served as department head and associate provost. She was one of the earlier African-American women to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics.
The Etta Z. Falconer Lecture is an award and lecture series which honors "women who have made distinguished contributions to the mathematical sciences or mathematics education". It is sponsored by the Association for Women in Mathematics and the Mathematical Association of America. The lectures began in 1996 and were named after the mathematician Etta Z. Falconer in 2004 "in memory of Falconer's profound vision and accomplishments in enhancing the movement of minorities and women into scientific careers". The recipient presents the lecture at MathFest each summer.
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.
Judith A. "Judy" Roitman is a mathematician, a retired professor at the University of Kansas. She specializes in set theory, topology, Boolean algebras, and mathematics education.
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Louise Hay was a French-born American mathematician. Her work focused on recursively enumerable sets and computational complexity theory, which was influential with both Soviet and US mathematicians in the 1970s. When she was appointed head of the mathematics department at the University of Illinois at Chicago, she was the only woman to head a math department at a major research university in her era.
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Marie A. Vitulli is an American mathematician and professor emerita at the University of Oregon.
Patricia D. Shure is an American mathematics educator. With Morton Brown and B. Alan Taylor, she is known for developing "Michigan calculus", a style of teaching calculus and combining cooperative real-world problem solving by the students with an instructional focus on conceptual understanding. She is a senior lecturer emerita of mathematics at the University of Michigan, where she taught from 1982 until her retirement in 2006.
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