Bodil Branner

Bodil Branner (born 5 February 1943, in Aarhus) is a retired Danish mathematician, one of the founders of European Women in Mathematics and a former chair of the Danish Mathematical Society. Her research concerned holomorphic dynamics and the history of mathematics. ^[1]

Education and career

Branner studied mathematics and physics at Aarhus University, where mathematician Svend Bundgaard was one of her mentors, and in 1967 earned a master's degree (the highest degree then available) under the supervision of Leif Kristensen. She had intended to travel to the U.S. for a doctorate, but her husband, a chemist, took an industry job in Copenhagen. Branner could not get a job as a high school teacher because she did not have a teaching qualification, but Bundgaard found her a position as a faculty assistant for Frederik Fabricius-Bjerre at the Technical University of Denmark. Despite this not beginning as an actual faculty position, she eventually earned tenure there in the 1970s. ^[1]

European Women in Mathematics was founded as an organization in 1986 by Branner, Caroline Series, Gudrun Kalmbach, Marie-Françoise Roy, and Dona Strauss, inspired by the activities of the Association for Women in Mathematics in the USA. ^[2]

Branner was the first woman to lead the Danish Mathematical Society, which she did from 1998 to 2002. ^[3]

She retired in 2008. ^[1]

Recognition

A symposium in honor of Branner's 60th birthday was held in Holbæk in 2003, and published as a festschrift in 2006. ^[4] In 2012, she became one of the inaugural fellows of the American Mathematical Society. ^[5]

Selected publications

• Branner, Bodil; Hubbard, John H. (1988), "The iteration of cubic polynomials. I. The global topology of parameter space", Acta Mathematica, 160 (3–4): 143–206, doi: 10.1007/BF02392275 , MR   0945011 .
• Branner, Bodil (1989), "The Mandelbrot set", Chaos and fractals (Providence, RI, 1988), Proc. Sympos. Appl. Math., vol. 39, Amer. Math. Soc., Providence, RI, pp. 75–105, doi:10.1090/psapm/039/1010237, ISBN   978-0-8218-0137-6, MR   1010237 .
• Branner, Bodil; Hubbard, John H. (1992), "The iteration of cubic polynomials. II. Patterns and parapatterns", Acta Mathematica, 169 (3–4): 229–325, doi: 10.1007/BF02392761 , MR   1194004 .
• Branner, Bodil; Johansen, Nils Voje (1999), "Caspar Wessel (1745–1818). Surveyor and mathematician", Matematisk-fysiske Meddelelser, 46 (1): 9–61, MR   1956505 .

References

1. Hjorth, Poul G. (June 2012), "Interview with Bodil Branner", Newsletter of the European Mathematical Society , 84, archived from the original on 2015-02-17, retrieved 2015-02-17
2. "European Women in Mathematics". MacTutor History of Mathematics archive . February 2018. Retrieved 2018-08-30.
3. Munkholm, Hans Jørgen (February 5, 2002), Bodil Branner og Dansk Matematisk Forening (in Danish), retrieved 2015-02-16.
4. Hjorth, Poul G.; Petersen, Carsten Lunde (2006), Dynamics on the Riemann sphere: A Bodil Branner Festschrift, Including papers from the Symposium on Holomorphic Dynamics held in Holbæk, June 2003, Zürich: European Mathematical Society (EMS), doi:10.4171/011, ISBN   3-03719-011-6, MR   2348951 .
5. List of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society, retrieved 2015-02-16.

External links

• Bodil Branner at the Mathematics Genealogy Project