Debra Boutin

Last updated

Debra Boutin
Born
Holyoke, Massachusetts
Nationality American
Alma materAB, Smith College,1991
PhD, Cornell University, 1998
Known for finite group theory, geometric graph theory, symmetries of graphs
Scientific career
Fields Mathematics
Institutions Trinity College (Connecticut), Hamilton College
Thesis Centralizers of Finite Subgroups of Automorphisms and Outer Automorphisms of Free Groups  (1998)
Doctoral advisor Karen Vogtmann
Website people.hamilton.edu/dboutin

Debra Lynn Boutin (born 1957 in Holyoke, Massachusetts) is an American mathematician, the Samuel F. Pratt Professor of Mathematics at Hamilton College, where she chairs the mathematics department. [1] Her research involves the symmetries of graphs and distinguishing colorings of graphs.

Contents

Education

Boutin is a 1975 graduate of Chicopee Comprehensive High School in Massachusetts. After high school, Boutin served in the United States Navy and United States Naval Reserve, 1975-1995, retiring as a Chief Petty Officer. She restarted her education, supported by the G.I. Bill, by studying data processing at Springfield Technical Community College in Massachusetts. Next, Boutin went to Smith College as an Ada Comstock Scholar. [2] She was awarded the Science Achievement Award at Smith and the Association for Women in Mathematics Alice T. Schafer Prize (honorable mention), [3] both in 1991. She graduated summa cum laude in 1991 with a bachelor's degree in mathematics. She was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and Sigma Xi in 1991.

She completed her Ph.D. in mathematics in 1998 at Cornell University. [4] Her doctoral dissertation, Centralizers of Finite Subgroups of Automorphisms and Outer Automorphisms of Free Groups, was supervised by Karen Vogtmann. [5]

Career

After a one-year visiting position at Trinity College (Connecticut), Boutin joined Hamilton College in Clinton, New York as an assistant professor in 1999. In 1999-2000 she was selected to be a Project NExT Fellow of the Mathematical Association of America. [6] She was tenured as an associate professor in 2005 and promoted to full professor in 2010. Boutin was awarded a named professorship in 2019 and has served as departmental chair since 2022. In summers between 2010 and 2018, Professor Boutin was a Research Adjunct at the Institute for Defense Analysis, Center for Communications Research [4] .

Research

Professor Boutin has published over 30 research papers in topics ranging from finite group theory , geometric graph theory , to graph symmetries in which she developed the concepts of distinguishing costs and determining numbers of graphs. These papers appear in combinatorics, graph theory, algebra and geometry journals. She has been invited and presented her research at conferences nationally and internationally. She has a large set of co-authors internationally and nationally. Her most frequent collaborator was Michael O. Albertson, the Smith College L. Clark Seelye Professor of Mathematics, [7] to whom she was married until his untimely death (m. 1993; died 2009). She has been called upon by colleges for professional evaluations, has been a referee for over 20 professional journals, and has served on committees of the American Mathematical Society and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics; she was elected Secretary of the latter's Discrete Mathematics Activity Group. [8]

Awards and honors

In 2008 Boutin was the inaugural recipient of the Dean's Scholarly Achievement Award for Early Career Achievement [9] and in 2023 the recipient of the Dean's Scholarly Achievement Award for Career Achievement, [10] both from Hamilton College. Hamilton College named Boutin as the Samuel F. Pratt Professor of Mathematics in 2019. [4]

Selected publications

  1. Boutin, Debra L., When are Centralizers of Finite Subgroups of Out(F_n) Finite?"Groups, Languages and Geometry". Contemporary Mathematics. Vol. 250. Providence, Rhode Island: American Mathematical Society. 1999. doi:10.1090/conm/250. ISBN   978-0-8218-1053-8. ISSN   1098-3627. MR   1732207.
  2. Albertson, Michael O.; Boutin, Debra L., Realizing Finite Groups in Euclidean Space, J. Algebra, 225(2000), no.2, 947-956. MR1741572.
  3. Boutin, Debra L., Convex Geometric Graphs with No Short Self-intersecting Paths, Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth Southeastern International Conference on Combinatorics, Graph Theory and Computing, Congr. Numer. 160(2003). MR2049115.
  4. Boutin, Debra L., Identifying Graph Automorphisms Using Determining Sets, Electron. J. Combin., 13(2006),no. 1, Research Paper 78 MR2255420 .

Related Research Articles

Combinatorics is an area of mathematics primarily concerned with counting, both as a means and as an end to obtaining results, and certain properties of finite structures. It is closely related to many other areas of mathematics and has many applications ranging from logic to statistical physics and from evolutionary biology to computer science.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dragan Marušič</span> Slovenian mathematician

Dragan Marušič is a Slovene mathematician. Marušič obtained his BSc in technical mathematics from the University of Ljubljana in 1976, and his PhD from the University of Reading in 1981 under the supervision of Crispin Nash-Williams.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Petersen graph</span> Cubic graph with 10 vertices and 15 edges

In the mathematical field of graph theory, the Petersen graph is an undirected graph with 10 vertices and 15 edges. It is a small graph that serves as a useful example and counterexample for many problems in graph theory. The Petersen graph is named after Julius Petersen, who in 1898 constructed it to be the smallest bridgeless cubic graph with no three-edge-coloring.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Béla Bollobás</span> Hungarian mathematician

Béla Bollobás FRS is a Hungarian-born British mathematician who has worked in various areas of mathematics, including functional analysis, combinatorics, graph theory, and percolation. He was strongly influenced by Paul Erdős from the age of 14.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Distance-transitive graph</span> Graph where any two nodes of equal distance are isomorphic

In the mathematical field of graph theory, a distance-transitive graph is a graph such that, given any two vertices v and w at any distance i, and any other two vertices x and y at the same distance, there is an automorphism of the graph that carries v to x and w to y. Distance-transitive graphs were first defined in 1971 by Norman L. Biggs and D. H. Smith.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cheryl Praeger</span> Australian mathematician

Cheryl Elisabeth Praeger is an Australian mathematician. Praeger received BSc (1969) and MSc degrees from the University of Queensland (1974), and a doctorate from the University of Oxford in 1973 under direction of Peter M. Neumann. She has published widely and has advised 27 PhD students. She is currently Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the University of Western Australia. She is best known for her works in group theory, algebraic graph theory and combinatorial designs.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Foster graph</span> Bipartite 3-regular graph with 90 vertices and 135 edges

In the mathematical field of graph theory, the Foster graph is a bipartite 3-regular graph with 90 vertices and 135 edges.

William Lawrence Kocay is a Canadian professor at the department of computer science at St. Paul's College of the University of Manitoba and a graph theorist. He is known for his work in graph algorithms and the reconstruction conjecture and is affectionately referred to as "Wild Bill" by his students. Bill Kocay is a former managing editor of Ars Combinatoria, a Canadian journal of combinatorial mathematics, is a founding fellow of the Institute of Combinatorics and its Applications.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Karen Vogtmann</span> American mathematician

Karen Vogtmann (born July 13, 1949 in Pittsburg, California) is an American mathematician working primarily in the area of geometric group theory. She is known for having introduced, in a 1986 paper with Marc Culler, an object now known as the Culler–Vogtmann Outer space. The Outer space is a free group analog of the Teichmüller space of a Riemann surface and is particularly useful in the study of the group of outer automorphisms of the free group on n generators, Out(Fn). Vogtmann is a professor of mathematics at Cornell University and the University of Warwick.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Frucht's theorem</span>

Frucht's theorem is a result in algebraic graph theory, conjectured by Dénes Kőnig in 1936 and proved by Robert Frucht in 1939. It states that every finite group is the group of symmetries of a finite undirected graph. More strongly, for any finite group G there exist infinitely many non-isomorphic simple connected graphs such that the automorphism group of each of them is isomorphic to G.

Norman Linstead Biggs is a leading British mathematician focusing on discrete mathematics and in particular algebraic combinatorics.

Daniela Kühn is a German mathematician and the Mason Professor in Mathematics at the University of Birmingham in Birmingham, England. She is known for her research in combinatorics, and particularly in extremal combinatorics and graph theory.

Joan Prince Hutchinson is an American mathematician and Professor Emerita of Mathematics from Macalester College.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Distinguishing coloring</span> Assignment of colors to graph vertices that destroys all symmetries

In graph theory, a distinguishing coloring or distinguishing labeling of a graph is an assignment of colors or labels to the vertices of the graph that destroys all of the nontrivial symmetries of the graph. The coloring does not need to be a proper coloring: adjacent vertices are allowed to be given the same color. For the colored graph, there should not exist any one-to-one mapping of the vertices to themselves that preserves both adjacency and coloring. The minimum number of colors in a distinguishing coloring is called the distinguishing number of the graph.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Zvezdelina Stankova</span> American mathematician

Zvezdelina Entcheva Stankova is an American mathematician who is a professor of mathematics at Mills College and a teaching professor at the University of California, Berkeley, the founder of the Berkeley Math Circle, and an expert in the combinatorial enumeration of permutations with forbidden patterns.

Amanda L. Folsom is an American mathematician specializing in analytic number theory and its applications in combinatorics. She is a professor of mathematics at Amherst College, where she chairs the department of mathematics and statistics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Klavdija Kutnar</span> Slovene mathematician

Klavdija Kutnar is a Slovene mathematician. She received her PhD at the University of Primorska (UP) in 2008, and she currently serves as the Rector of the university.

Melody Tung Chan is an American mathematician and violinist who works as Associate Professor of Mathematics at Brown University. She is a winner of the Alice T. Schafer Prize and of the AWM–Microsoft Research Prize in Algebra and Number Theory. Her research involves combinatorial commutative algebra, graph theory, and tropical geometry.

Joy Morris is a Canadian mathematician whose research involves group theory, graph theory, and the connections between the two through Cayley graphs. She is also interested in mathematics education, is the author of two open-access undergraduate mathematics textbooks, and oversees a program in which university mathematics education students provide a drop-in mathematics tutoring service for parents of middle school students. She is a professor of mathematics at the University of Lethbridge.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Martin Liebeck</span>

Martin Liebeck is a professor of Pure Mathematics at Imperial College London whose research interests include group theory and algebraic combinatorics.

References

  1. ↑ Mathematics faculty, Hamilton College, retrieved 2023-01-09
  2. ↑ Danko, Jim (2 June 2022), STCC gives: Now a professor, former student inspired to offer support, Springfield Technical Community College
  3. ↑ "Alice T. Schafer Mathematics Prize". Association for Women in Mathematics. Retrieved 2024-02-22.
  4. 1 2 3 Curriculum vitae (PDF), Hamilton College, March 2022, retrieved 2023-01-09
  5. ↑ Debra Boutin at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  6. ↑ "Fellows Search Form". Mathematical Association of America. Retrieved 2024-03-19.
  7. ↑ "Albertson, Michael O. , 1946-2009". Smith College. Retrieved 2024-02-23.
  8. ↑ "SIAM Activity Group on Discrete Mathematics: Archive: Past Officers, 2012 - 2013". SIAM. Retrieved 2024-02-22.
  9. ↑ "Inaugural Dean's Scholarly Achievement Awards Honor Five Faculty Members". Hamilton College. Retrieved 2024-02-22.
  10. ↑ "10 Faculty Receive Dean's Scholarly Achievement Awards". Hamilton College. Retrieved 2024-02-22.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.