Carol Smith Schumacher (born 1960) [1] is a Bolivian-born American mathematician specializing in real analysis, a mathematics educator, and a textbook author. She is a professor of mathematics at Kenyon College, and vice president of the Mathematical Association of America. [2]
Schumacher was born in La Paz, Bolivia [3] as the daughter of missionaries, and grew up in Bolivia speaking both English and Spanish. [4] She majored in mathematics at Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas, and graduated with honors in 1982. [5] It was in freshman calculus at Hendrix that she met her husband, physicist and quantum information theorist Benjamin Schumacher. [6]
She went to the University of Texas at Austin for graduate study, and completed her Ph.D. in 1989 with a dissertation on the theory of Banach spaces, jointly supervised by Edward Odell and Haskell Rosenthal. [5] [7]
Schumacher joined Kenyon College as Dana Assistant Professor in 1988, has been full professor there since 2002, [5] and has been department chair for several terms. She was elected vice president of the Mathematical Association of America for the 2018–2020 term. [8]
Schumacher is the author of two inquiry-based learning textbooks: [4] Chapter Zero: Fundamental Notions of Abstract Mathematics, on the transition to proofs (Addison-Wesley, 1996; 2nd edition, 2001) [9] and Closer and Closer: Introducing Real Analysis, on real analysis (Jones and Bartlett, 2008). [10]
Kenyon College gave Schumacher their Senior Trustee Teaching Excellence Award in 2005. [5] [11] She was the 2017 winner of the Distinguished Teaching Award of the Ohio Section of the Mathematical Association of America. [12]
Schumacher is a 2023 recipient of one of the Deborah and Franklin Haimo Awards for Distinguished College or University Teaching of Mathematics. [13]
