Maryanthe Elizabeth Malliaris is a professor of mathematics at the University of Chicago, [1] a specialist in model theory.
Malliaris is the daughter of Anastasios G. (Tassos) Malliaris, an economist at Loyola University Chicago, and Mary E. Malliaris, Professor of Information Systems at Loyola. [2]
As an undergraduate at Harvard College, Malliaris wrote for the Harvard Crimson , [3] contributed a biography of Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman to the Encyclopedia of Postmodernism, [ZB] and worked for a startup called Zaps. [4]
She graduated from Harvard in 2001 with a concentration in mathematics, [4] and earned her PhD in 2009 from the University of California, Berkeley under the supervision of Thomas Scanlon. Her dissertation was Persistence and Regularity in Unstable Model Theory. [5]
In her dissertation and postdoctoral research, Malliaris studied unstable model theory and its connection, via characteristic sequences, to graph theoretic concepts such as the Szemerédi regularity lemma. [6]
She is also known for two joint papers with Saharon Shelah connecting topology, set theory, and model theory. [MS13] [MS16] In this work, Malliaris and Shelah used Keisler's order, a construction from model theory, to prove the equality between two cardinal characteristics of the continuum, 𝖕 and 𝖙, which are greater than the smallest infinite cardinal and less than or equal to the cardinality of the continuum. This resolved a problem in set theory that had been open for fifty years. Their work also solved another problem, by showing that SOP2 theories are maximal in Keisler's order. [7] [8] [9]
Malliaris won a Kurt Gödel Research Prize in 2010 for her work in unstable model theory. [10]
In 2017, she and Saharon Shelah shared the Hausdorff Medal of the European Set Theory Society for their joint papers. [8]
She was an invited speaker at the 2018 International Congress of Mathematicians. [11] She received the Quantrell Award. [12]
| ZB. | Malliaris, Maryanthe (2003), "Zygmunt Bauman", in Taylor, Victor E.; Winquist, Charles E. (eds.), Encyclopedia of Postmodernism, Psychology Press, pp. 30–31, ISBN 9780415308861 |
| MS13. | Malliaris, Maryanthe; Shelah, Saharon (2013), "General topology meets model theory, on 𝔭 and 𝔱", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America , 110 (33): 13300–13305, Bibcode:2013PNAS..11013300M, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1306114110 , MR 3105597, PMC 3746882 , PMID 23836659 |
| MS16. | Malliaris, M.; Shelah, S. (2016), "Cofinality spectrum theorems in model theory, set theory, and general topology", Journal of the American Mathematical Society , 29 (1): 237–297, arXiv: 1208.5424 , doi:10.1090/jams830, MR 3402699, S2CID 13182394 |