Melanie Wood

Last updated
Melanie Wood
Melanie Wood 2019.jpg
Wood in 2019
Born1981 (age 4243)
Indianapolis, Indiana
NationalityAmerican
Alma mater Duke University
Trinity College, Cambridge
Princeton University
Awards Morgan Prize (2004)

NSF CAREER Award (2017)

AWM-Microsoft Research Prize in Algebra and Number Theory (2018)
Scientific career
FieldsMathematics
Institutions Stanford University
University of Wisconsin
University of California, Berkeley
Harvard University
Thesis Moduli spaces for rings and ideals  (2009)
Doctoral advisor Manjul Bhargava

Melanie Matchett Wood (born 1981) [1] is an American mathematician and Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University [2] who was the first woman to qualify for the U.S. International Mathematical Olympiad Team. She completed her PhD in 2009 at Princeton University (under Manjul Bhargava). Previously, she was Chancellor's Professor of Mathematics at UC Berkeley, Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Mathematics at the University of Wisconsin, and spent 2 years as Szegö Assistant Professor at Stanford University.

Contents

She is a number theorist; more specifically, her research centers on arithmetic statistics, with excursions into related questions in arithmetic geometry and probability theory.[ citation needed ]

Early life

Wood was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, to Sherry Eggers and Archie Wood, both middle school teachers. Her father, who taught mathematics, died of cancer when Wood was six weeks old. [3]

While a high school student at Park Tudor School in Indianapolis, Wood (then aged 16) became the first female American to make the U.S. International Mathematical Olympiad Team, receiving silver medals in the 1998 and 1999 International Mathematical Olympiad. [4] Wood was also a cheerleader and student newspaper editor at her school. [5]

Awards

In 2002, she received the Alice T. Schafer Prize from the Association for Women in Mathematics.

In 2003, Wood graduated from Duke University where she won a Gates Cambridge Scholarship, Fulbright fellowship (declined to accept the Gates Cambridge Scholarship), and a National Science Foundation graduate fellowship, in addition to becoming the first American woman and second woman overall to be named a Putnam Fellow in 2002. [2] [6] [7] [8]

During the 2003–2004 school year, she studied at Cambridge University. She was also named the Deputy Leader of the U.S. team that finished second overall at the 2005 International Mathematical Olympiad. [9]

In 2004, she won the Morgan Prize for work in two topics, Belyi-extending maps and P-orderings, making her the first woman to win this award. [4] [8]

In 2012, she became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. [10]

In 2017, she received an NSF CAREER Award.

In 2018, she received the AWM-Microsoft Research Prize in Algebra and Number Theory from the Association for Women in Mathematics. [11]

From 2019 to 2021, Wood was an American Mathematical Society (AMS) Council member at large. [12]

In 2021, she received the NSF Alan T. Waterman Award. [13]

In 2022, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. [14]

Selected publications

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lenore Blum</span> USA computer scientist and mathematician

Lenore Carol Blum is an American computer scientist and mathematician who has made contributions to the theories of real number computation, cryptography, and pseudorandom number generation. She was a distinguished career professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University until 2019 and is currently a professor in residence at the University of California, Berkeley. She is also known for her efforts to increase diversity in mathematics and computer science.

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

Karen Keskulla Uhlenbeck ForMemRS is an American mathematician and one of the founders of modern geometric analysis. She is a professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of Texas at Austin, where she held the Sid W. Richardson Foundation Regents Chair. She is currently a distinguished visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study and a visiting senior research scholar at Princeton University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Akshay Venkatesh</span> Australian-American mathematician (born 1981)

Akshay Venkatesh is an Australian-American mathematician and a professor at the School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study. His research interests are in the fields of counting, equidistribution problems in automorphic forms and number theory, in particular representation theory, locally symmetric spaces, ergodic theory, and algebraic topology.

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">Chuu-Lian Terng</span> Taiwanese-American mathematician

Chuu-Lian Terng is a Taiwanese-American mathematician. Her research areas are differential geometry and integrable systems, with particular interests in completely integrable Hamiltonian partial differential equations and their relations to differential geometry, the geometry and topology of submanifolds in symmetric spaces, and the geometry of isometric actions.

Alison Beth Miller is an American mathematician who was the first American female gold medalist at the International Mathematical Olympiad. She also holds the distinction of placing in the top 16 of the Putnam Competition four times, the last three of which were recognized by the Elizabeth Lowell Putnam award for outstanding performance by a woman on the contest.

Bryna Rebekah Kra is an American mathematician and Sarah Rebecca Roland Professor at Northwestern University who is on the board of trustees of the American Mathematical Society and was elected the president of the American Mathematical Society in 2021. As a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences, Kra has made significant contributions to the structure theory of characteristic factors for multiple ergodic averages. Her academic work centered on dynamical systems and ergodic theory, and uses dynamical methods to address problems in number theory and combinatorics.

There is a long history of women in mathematics in the United States. All women mentioned here are American unless otherwise noted.

This is a timeline of women in mathematics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cora Sadosky</span> Argentine mathematician

Cora Susana Sadosky de Goldstein was an Argentine mathematician and Professor of Mathematics at Howard University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ruth Charney</span> American mathematician

Ruth Michele Charney is an American mathematician known for her work in geometric group theory and Artin groups. Other areas of research include K-theory and algebraic topology. She holds the Theodore and Evelyn G. Berenson Chair in Mathematics at Brandeis University. She was in the first group of mathematicians named Fellows of the American Mathematical Society. She was in the first group of mathematicians named Fellows of the Association for Women in Mathematics. She served as president of the Association for Women in Mathematics during 2013–2015, and served as president of the American Mathematical Society for the 2021–2023 term.

Laura Grace DeMarco is a professor of mathematics at Harvard University, whose research concerns dynamical systems and complex analysis.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ioana Dumitriu</span> Romanian-American mathematician

Ioana Dumitriu is a Romanian-American mathematician who works as a professor of mathematics at the University of California, San Diego. Her research interests include the theory of random matrices, numerical analysis, scientific computing, and game theory.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carol Wood</span> American mathematician

Carol Saunders Wood is a retired American mathematician, the Edward Burr Van Vleck Professor of Mathematics, Emerita, at Wesleyan University. Her research concerns mathematical logic and model-theoretic algebra, and in particular the theory of differentially closed fields.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tatiana Toro</span> Colombian–American mathematician (born 1964)

Tatiana Toro is a Colombian-American mathematician at the University of Washington. Her research is "at the interface of geometric measure theory, harmonic analysis and partial differential equations". Toro was appointed director of the Simons Laufer Mathematical Sciences Institute for 2022–2027.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jennifer Balakrishnan</span> American mathematician

Jennifer Shyamala Sayaka Balakrishnan is an American mathematician known for leading a team that solved the problem of the "cursed curve", a Diophantine equation that was known for being "famously difficult". More generally, Balakrishnan specializes in algorithmic number theory and arithmetic geometry. She is a Clare Boothe Luce Professor at Boston 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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bianca Viray</span> American mathematician

Bianca L. Viray is an American mathematician and professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. She works in arithmetic geometry, which is a blend of algebraic geometry and algebraic number theory.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wei Ho</span> American mathematician

Wei Ho is an American mathematician specializing in number theory, algebraic geometry, arithmetic geometry, and representation theory. She is an associate professor of mathematics at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Pallavi Dani is an Indian-American mathematician and an associate professor of mathematics at Louisiana State University (LSU) in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Her research area is geometric group theory; in particular, she studies quasi-isometry invariants of groups.

References

  1. "AWM Essay Contest: Leena Shah" . Retrieved November 11, 2014.
  2. 1 2 "Melanie Matchett Wood" (PDF). math.berkeley.edu. Retrieved 2019-07-27.
  3. Olson, Steven (2005). Count Down: Six Kids Vie for Glory at the World's Toughest Math Competition. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. p. 18. ISBN   0-618-56212-5.
  4. 1 2 "Melanie Wood Interview" . Retrieved 11 November 2014.
  5. Rimer, Sara (2008-10-10). "Math Skills Suffer in U.S., Study Finds". New York Times. Retrieved 2008-10-10.
  6. "Duke Magazine-Where Are They Now?-January/February 2010" . Retrieved November 11, 2014.
  7. "Cogito - Melanie Wood: The Making of a Mathematician". Archived from the original on 2010-07-07. Retrieved 2014-02-10.
  8. 1 2 Profile, ams.org. Accessed November 15, 2022.
  9. "2005 IMO US Team Results | Mathematical Association of America". maa.org. Retrieved 2020-10-27.
  10. List of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society. Retrieved 2013-09-01.
  11. "AWM-Microsoft Research Prize in Algebra and Number Theory 2018". Association for Women in Mathematics. Retrieved January 26, 2019.
  12. "AMS Committees". American Mathematical Society. Retrieved 2023-03-29.
  13. "NSF recognizes a mathematician and a social scientist with the Alan T. Waterman Award". nsf.gov. Retrieved 2021-05-13.
  14. "Harvard Math Professor Melanie Matchett Wood Wins 'Genius Grant'". thecrimson.com.