Victoria Powers

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Vicki Powers Vicki Powers.jpg
Vicki Powers

Victoria Ann Powers is an American mathematician specializing in algebraic geometry and known for her work on positive polynomials and on the mathematics of electoral systems. [1] She is a professor in the department of mathematics at Emory University.

Contents

She is the author of the book Certificates of Positivity for Real Polynomials—Theory, Practice, and Applications (Springer, 2021). [2] A review on MathSciNet said that "In the reviewer's opinion this is a very nice and concise presentation of the most important pillars of real algebra up to the present time"

Education and career

Powers graduated from the University of Chicago in 1980, with a bachelor's degree in mathematics. She completed her Ph.D. in 1985 at Cornell University. [3] Her dissertation, Finite Constructable Spaces of Signatures, was supervised by Alex F. T. W. Rosenberg. [4]

After completing her doctorate, she joined the faculty at the University of Hawaii, but moved to Emory University only two years later, in 1987. She was on leave from Emory as a Humboldt Fellow and Alexander von Humboldt research professor at the University of Regensburg in 1991–1992, as a visiting professor at the Complutense University of Madrid in 2002–2003, and as a program officer at the National Science Foundation in 2013–2015. [3] From 2012-2014, Powers served as a Council Member at Large for the American Mathematical Society. [5]

Powers' work moved from abstract real algebraic geometry to more concrete questions related to positive polynomials in one and several variables and voting theory. Her collaborators have included Eberhard Becker, Mari Castle, Bruce Reznick, Claus Scheiderer and Thorsten Wormann.

Selected papers

Personal

Powers is married to Colm Mulcahy, an Irish mathematician who had the same doctoral advisor. [6]

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References

  1. Rogers, Adam (June 6, 2018), "Elections Don't Work at All. You Can Blame the Math", Wired
  2. Powers, Victoria (2021) Certificates of Positivity for Real Polynomials—Theory, Practice, and Applications Springer, ISBN   978-3-030-85546-8
  3. 1 2 Curriculum vitae (PDF), January 2017, retrieved 2019-08-31
  4. "Cornell Mathematics Doctorates, 1980–1989", Graduate Program History, Cornell Department of Mathematics, retrieved 2024-04-01
  5. "AMS Committees". American Mathematical Society. Retrieved 2023-03-27.
  6. See the dedication to Mulcahy, Colm (February 14, 2013), "In My Heart of Hearts: Valentine's Day Special", Huffington Post