Rhonda Hughes

Last updated
Rhonda Jo Hughes
Born
Rhonda Weisberg

(1947-09-28) September 28, 1947 (age 77)
Nationality American
Alma mater University of Illinois at Chicago
Known forFounding the EDGE Program
Awards
Scientific career
Fields Mathematics, Functional analysis
Institutions Tufts University, Bryn Mawr College
Thesis Semi-Groups of Unbounded Linear Operators in Banach Space  (1975)
Doctoral advisor Shmuel Kantorovitz

Rhonda Jo Hughes (born Rhonda Weisberg September 28, 1947) [1] is an American mathematician, the Helen Herrmann Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Bryn Mawr College. [2]

Contents

Education

Hughes grew up on the South Side of Chicago. She attended Gage Park High School, where she was a cheerleader and valedictorian of her class. She studied engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign for one and a half years, then left school and worked for six months before resuming her education at the University of Illinois at Chicago on an Illinois State Scholarship studying mathematics. There, she came under the mentorship of Yoram Sagher, who encouraged her to pursue graduate studies in mathematics. [1] She earned a Ph.D. from the same university in 1975, under the supervision of Shmuel Kantorovitz, with a dissertation entitled Semi-Groups of Unbounded Linear Operators in Banach Space. [1] [3]

Career

She began her teaching career at Tufts University then spent a year as a fellow at the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College. She moved to Bryn Mawr College in 1980, [1] where she served as department chair for six years. She is the Helen Herrmann professor emeritus of mathematics at Bryn Mawr, and retired in 2011. [4]

She was president of the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) 1987–1988. [1] [5] She has served on the Commission on Physical Science, Mathematics, and Applications of the United States National Research Council. [1] She served as an American Mathematical Society (AMS) Council member at large from 1988 to 1990. [6]

She and Sylvia Bozeman organized the Spelman-Bryn Mawr Summer Mathematics Program for female undergraduate students from 1992 to 1994. [1] In 1998, they founded the EDGE Program (Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education), a transition program for women entering graduate programs in the mathematical sciences. The program is now in its twentieth year.

Her most recent research involves ill-posed problems. [2]

Honors

In 1998, Hughes received the Deborah and Franklin Haimo Award for Distinguished College or University Teaching of Mathematics. [7]

In 2004 she received the AAAS Mentor Award for Lifetime Achievement, in 2010 the Gweneth Humphreys Award for Mentorship of Undergraduate Women in Mathematics of the Association for Women in Mathematics, [8] and in 2013 she received the Elizabeth Bingham Award of the Philadelphia Chapter of the Association for Women in Science. [4]

In 2017, she was selected as a fellow of the Association for Women in Mathematics in the inaugural class. [9]

Related Research Articles

The EDGE Foundation is an organization which helps women get advanced degrees in mathematics.

The Deborah and Franklin Tepper Haimo Awards for Distinguished College or University Teaching of Mathematics are awards given by the Mathematical Association of America to recognize college or university teachers "who have been widely recognized as extraordinarily successful and whose teaching effectiveness has been shown to have had influence beyond their own institutions." The Haimo awards are the highest teaching honor bestowed by the MAA. The awards were established in 1993 by Deborah Tepper Haimo and named after Haimo and her husband Franklin Haimo. After the first year of the award up to three awards are given every year.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Association for Women in Mathematics</span> American professional society

The Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) is a professional society whose mission is to encourage women and girls to study and to have active careers in the mathematical sciences, and to promote equal opportunity for and the equal treatment of women and girls in the mathematical sciences. The AWM was founded in 1971 and incorporated in the state of Massachusetts. AWM has approximately 5200 members, including over 250 institutional members, such as colleges, universities, institutes, and mathematical societies. It offers numerous programs and workshops to mentor women and girls in the mathematical sciences. Much of AWM's work is supported through federal grants.

Helen Giessler Grundman is an American mathematician. She is the Director of Education and Diversity at the American Mathematical Society and Research Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Bryn Mawr College. Grundman is noted for her research in number theory and efforts to increase diversity in mathematics.

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

Jennifer J. Quinn is an American mathematician specializing in combinatorics, and professor of mathematics at the University of Washington Tacoma. She sits on the board of governors of the Mathematical Association of America, and is serving as its president for the years 2021 and 2022. From 2004 to 2008 she was co-editor of Math Horizons.

Sylvia Margaret Wiegand is an American mathematician.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fern Hunt</span> American mathematician

Fern Yvette Hunt is an African American mathematician known for her work in applied mathematics and mathematical biology. She currently works as a researcher at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, where she conducts research on the ergodic theory of dynamical systems.

Ellen Elizabeth Kirkman is professor of mathematics at Wake Forest University. Her research interests include noncommutative algebra, representation theory, and homological algebra.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Judy L. Walker</span> American mathematician

Judy Leavitt Walker is an American mathematician. She is the Aaron Douglas Professor of Mathematics at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, where she chaired the mathematics department from 2012 through 2016 and currently serves as the Associate Vice Chancellor for Faculty Affairs. Her research is in the area of algebraic coding theory.

Terrie Christine Stevens, also known as T. Christine Stevens, is an American mathematician whose research concerns topological groups, the history of mathematics, and mathematics education. She is also known as the co-founder of Project NExT, a mentorship program for recent doctorates in mathematics, which she directed from 1994 until 2009.

<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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Deanna Haunsperger</span> American mathematician

Deanna Haunsperger is an American mathematician and Professor of Mathematics at Carleton College. She was the president of the Mathematical Association of America for the 2017–2018 term. She co-created and co-organized the Carleton College Summer Mathematics Program for Women, which ran every summer from 1995 to 2014.

Suzanne L. Weekes is the Executive Director of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. She is also Professor of Mathematical Sciences at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). She is a co-founder of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute Undergraduate Program.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Erika Camacho</span> Mexican-American mathematician

Erika Tatiana Camacho is a Mexican and American mathematical biologist and professor of mathematics at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She is a 2014 Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring (PAESMEM) awardee. She was taught and mentored in high school by Jaime Escalante, who was the subject of the movie Stand and Deliver.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ruth Haas</span> American mathematician and academic

Ruth Haas is an American mathematician and professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Previously she was the Achilles Professor of Mathematics at Smith College. She received the M. Gweneth Humphreys Award from the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) in 2015 for her mentorship of women in mathematics. Haas was named an inaugural AWM Fellow in 2017. In 2017 she was elected President of the AWM and on February 1, 2019 she assumed that position.

Margaret Maher Robinson is an American mathematician specializing in number theory and the theory of zeta functions. She is the Julia and Sarah Ann Adams Professor of Mathematics at Mount Holyoke College.

Jacqueline M. Dewar is an American mathematician and mathematics educator known for her distinguished teaching and her mentorship of women in mathematics. She is a professor emerita of mathematics at Loyola Marymount University.

Leslie Hogben is an American mathematician specializing in graph theory and linear algebra, and known for her mentorship of graduate students in mathematics. She is a professor emerita of mathematics at Iowa State University, where she held the Dio Lewis Holl Chair in Applied Mathematics 2012-2020; she was also professor of electrical and computer engineering at Iowa State, associate dean for graduate studies and faculty development of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State (2019-2024), and associate director for diversity at the American Institute of Mathematics.

Pamela Estephania Harris is a Mexican-American mathematician, educator and advocate for immigrants. She is currently an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was formerly an associate professor at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts and is co-founder of the online platform Lathisms. She is also an editor of the e-mentoring blog of the American Mathematical Society (AMS).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">James A. Morrow</span> American mathematician

James Allen Morrow was an American mathematician. His research interests shifted from several complex variables and differential geometry to discrete inverse problems in the middle of his career.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Morrow, Charlene; Perl, Teri, eds. (1998), "Rhonda Hughes (1947–)", Notable Women in Mathematics, a Biographical Dictionary, Greenwood Press, pp. 85–89.
  2. 1 2 Faculty profile, Bryn Mawr College, retrieved 2017-08-15
  3. Rhonda Hughes at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  4. 1 2 "Professor Emeritus Rhonda Hughes Awarded Elizabeth Bingham Award", Inside Bryn Mawr, Bryn Mawr College, March 28, 2013, retrieved 2016-02-04.
  5. Blum, Lenore (1991), "A brief history of the Association for Women in Mathematics: the Presidents' perspectives", Notices of the American Mathematical Society , 38 (7): 738–754, MR   1125380, archived from the original on 7 March 2018, retrieved 4 May 2020.
  6. "AMS Committees". American Mathematical Society. Retrieved 2023-03-29.
  7. "Recipients of the Deborah and Franklin Tepper Haimo Award for Distinguished College or University Teaching of Mathematics; Mathematical Association of America". www.maa.org. Archived from the original on 2024-06-08.
  8. Rhonda Hughes to Receive First AWM Humphreys Award, Edge for Women, December 15, 2010, retrieved 2016-02-04.
  9. "2018 Inaugural Class of AWM Fellows". awm-math.org/awards/awm-fellows/. Association for Women in Mathematics . Retrieved 4 May 2020.