Gertrude Ehrlich

Last updated

Gertrude Ehrlich (born January 7, 1923) is an Austrian-American mathematician, specializing in abstract algebra and algebraic number theory. She is a professor emerita of mathematics at the University of Maryland, College Park. [1]

Contents

Early life and education

Ehrlich was born on January 7, 1923, in Vienna, [2] the daughter of Jewish lawyer Josef Ehrlich and his wife Charlotte, née Kobak. [3] In the late 1930s, she became a student at the Chajes Gymnasium, a special high school in Vienna for Jewish honor students; her classmates included future Nobel laureate Walter Kohn and mathematicians Rodolfo Permutti and Karl Greger. [4] She was able to escape Nazi-occupied Austria in 1939, traveling with her mother, her older sister Margarete Ehrlich (a philosophy student and later radiographer) and aunt Mathilde Ehrlich (a painter) to the US on the SS Statendam in July 1939; her father rejoined them a year later. They lived for the next several years with her uncle Benedict Kobak in Atlanta. [3] She became a US citizen in 1945. [5]

She graduated from the Georgia State College for Women in 1943, and earned a master's degree from the University of North Carolina in 1945. [2] She completed her Ph.D. in 1953 at the University of Tennessee. Her dissertation, The Structure of Continuous Rings, was supervised by Wallace Givens. [6] [7]

Contributions

Ehrlich is the author of the book Fundamental Concepts of Abstract Algebra (PWS-Kent Publishing, 1991; Dover, 2011). [8] She is the coauthor of The Structure of the Real Number System (with Leon Warren Cohen, D. Van Nostrand, 1963) [9] and of Algebra (with Jacob Goldhaber, Macmillan, 1970; Robert E. Krieger Publishing, 1980). [10]

In 1964 she became editor of the "Classroom Notes" department of The American Mathematical Monthly . [11] She was the first organizer of the University of Maryland High School Mathematics Competition, held annually for high school students in Maryland and the District of Columbia, starting in 1979. [12]

The concept of a morphic group comes from a 1976 research paper of Ehrlich, "Units and one-sided units in regular rings", in the Transactions of the American Mathematical Society , [13] and Ehrlich's theorem on the endomorphisms of morphic groups, from the same paper, is named for her. [14]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Garrett Birkhoff</span> American mathematician (1911–1996)

Garrett Birkhoff was an American mathematician. He is best known for his work in lattice theory.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Øystein Ore</span> Norwegian mathematician (1899–1968)

Øystein Ore was a Norwegian mathematician known for his work in ring theory, Galois connections, graph theory, and the history of mathematics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Olga Taussky-Todd</span> Mathematician (1906–1995)

Olga Taussky-Todd was an Austrian and later Czech-American mathematician. She published more than 300 research papers on algebraic number theory, integral matrices, and matrices in algebra and analysis.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nathan Jacobson</span> American mathematician (1910–1999)

Nathan Jacobson was an American mathematician.

Joan Sylvia Lyttle Birman is an American mathematician, specializing in low-dimensional topology. She has made contributions to the study of knots, 3-manifolds, mapping class groups of surfaces, geometric group theory, contact structures and dynamical systems. Birman is research professor emerita at Barnard College, Columbia University, where she has been since 1973.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Vera Pless</span> American mathematician (1931–2020)

Vera Pless was an American mathematician who specialized in combinatorics and coding theory. She was professor emerita at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Jessica Katherine Sklar is a mathematician interested in abstract algebra, recreational mathematics, mathematics and art, and mathematics and popular culture. She is a professor of mathematics at Pacific Lutheran University, and former head of the mathematics department at Pacific Lutheran.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Helen Abbot Merrill</span> American mathematician (1864-1949)

Helen Abbot Merrill was an American mathematician, educator and textbook author

Frank Grosshans is an American mathematician who works in invariant theory, where he is known for the discovery of Grosshans subgroups and Grosshans graded coefficients. He is a professor of mathematics at West Chester University, Pennsylvania. Grosshans has been an invited speaker at meetings of the Mathematical Association of America.

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.

Karen Ellen Smith is an American mathematician, specializing in commutative algebra and algebraic geometry. She completed her bachelor's degree in mathematics at Princeton University before earning her PhD in mathematics at the University of Michigan in 1993. Currently she is the Keeler Professor of Mathematics at the University of Michigan. In addition to being a researcher in algebraic geometry and commutative algebra, Smith with others wrote the textbook An Invitation to Algebraic Geometry.

Rebecca A. Herb is an American mathematician, a professor emerita at the University of Maryland. Her research involves abstract algebra and Lie groups.

George Finlay Simmons was an American mathematician who worked in topology and classical analysis. He is known as the author of widely used textbooks on university mathematics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Emily Riehl</span> American mathematician

Emily Riehl is an American mathematician who has contributed to higher category theory and homotopy theory. Much of her work, including her PhD thesis, concerns model structures and more recently the foundations of infinity-categories. She is the author of two textbooks and serves on the editorial boards of three journals.

Margaret Alice Waugh Maxfield was an American mathematician and mathematics book author.

Ellen Johnston Maycock is an American mathematician and mathematics educator. She is the former Johnson Family University Professor and professor emerita of mathematics at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana. Her mathematical research was in functional analysis.

Judith Lee MacKenzie Gersting is an American mathematician, computer scientist, and textbook author. She is a professor emerita of computer science at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis and at the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo.

Harriet Madeline Griffin was an American mathematician, and the author of a textbook on number theory. She taught for many years at Brooklyn College.

Eve Alexandra Littig Torrence is an American mathematician, a professor emerita of mathematics at Randolph–Macon College, and a former president of mathematics society Pi Mu Epsilon. She is known for her award-winning writing and books in mathematics, for her mathematical origami art, and for her efforts debunking overly broad claims regarding the ubiquity of the golden ratio.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Della Dumbaugh</span> American mathematician and historian of mathematics

Della Jeanne Dumbaugh is an American mathematician and historian of mathematics, focusing on the history of algebra and number theory. She is a professor of mathematics at the University of Richmond, and the editor-in-chief of The American Mathematical Monthly.

References

  1. "Ehrlich, Gertrude, Prof Emerita", Directory, University of Maryland Department of Mathematics, retrieved 2021-03-27
  2. 1 2 Murray, Margaret A. M., "Gertrude Ehrlich, Tennessee 1953", Women Becoming Mathematicians: American women mathematics PhDs 1940–1959, retrieved 2021-03-27
  3. 1 2 "Margarete Ehrlich", Memorial Book for the Victims of National Socialism at the University of Vienna in 1938, University of Vienna, retrieved 2021-03-27
  4. Neuhaus, Herbert (2003), "A class with class", in Scheffler, Matthias; Weinberger, Peter (eds.), Walter Kohn: Personal Stories and Anecdotes Told by Friends and Collaborators, Springer, pp. 173–174, ISBN   9783540008057
  5. "Ehrlich, Gertrude", Katalog (in German), German National Library, retrieved 2021-03-27
  6. Gertrude Ehrlich at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  7. Review of The Structure of Continuous Rings: Israel Halperin, MR 0062117
  8. Review of Fundamental Concepts of Abstract Algebra: Allen Stenger, MAA Reviews,
  9. Reviews of The Structure of the Real Number System: H. G. Anderson, Proc. Edinburgh Math. Soc., doi:10.1017/S001309150001155X; Krister Segerberg, J. Symbolic Logic, doi:10.2307/2270860, JSTOR   2270860
  10. Reviews of Algebra: J. O. Kiltinen, Amer. Math. Monthly, doi:10.2307/2978111, JSTOR   2978111; R. E. MacRae, MR 0256803; B. F. Wyman, Amer. Math. Monthly, doi:10.2307/2318043, JSTOR   2318043
  11. May, Kenneth O., ed. (1972), "Departmental Editors of the Monthly: 1916-1965", The Mathematical Association of America: Its First Fifty Years (PDF), Mathematical Association of America, pp. 135–137
  12. The University of Maryland High School Mathematics Competition, University of Maryland Department of Mathematics, retrieved 2021-03-27
  13. Li, Yuanlin; Nicholson, W. K.; Zan, Libo (2010), "Morphic groups", Journal of Pure and Applied Algebra, 214 (10): 1827–1834, doi:10.1016/j.jpaa.2009.12.026, MR   2608111
  14. Li, Yuanlin; Nicholson, W. K. (2010), "Ehrlich's theorem for groups", Bulletin of the Australian Mathematical Society, 81 (2): 304–309, doi: 10.1017/S000497270900094X , MR   2609111