Elizabeth Hahnemann Cuthill (October 16, 1923 – January 11, 2011) was an American

applied mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, mathematical structure, structure, space, Mathematica ...

and

numerical analyst Numerical analysis is the study of algorithms that use numerical approximation (as opposed to symbolic manipulations) for the problems of mathematical analysis (as distinguished from discrete mathematics). It is the study of numerical methods ...

known for her work on

sparse matrix In numerical analysis and scientific computing, a sparse matrix or sparse array is a matrix in which most of the elements are zero. There is no strict definition regarding the proportion of zero-value elements for a matrix to qualify as sparse b ...

algorithms, on block iterative methods for the numerical approximation of

differential equation In mathematics, a differential equation is an equation that relates one or more unknown functions and their derivatives. In applications, the functions generally represent physical quantities, the derivatives represent their rates of change, an ...

s, and on the development of computer simulations of

nuclear reactor A nuclear reactor is a device used to initiate and control a fission nuclear chain reaction or nuclear fusion reactions. Nuclear reactors are used at nuclear power plants for electricity generation and in nuclear marine propulsion. Heat fr ...

s. She was a researcher for the

United States Navy The United States Navy (USN) is the maritime service branch of the United States Armed Forces and one of the eight uniformed services of the United States. It is the largest and most powerful navy in the world, with the estimated tonnage ...

at the

David Taylor Model Basin The David Taylor Model Basin (DTMB) is one of the largest ship model basins—test facilities for the development of ship design—in the world. DTMB is a field activity of the Carderock Division of the Naval Surface Warfare Center. Hist ...

. The

Cuthill–McKee algorithm In numerical linear algebra, the Cuthill–McKee algorithm (CM), named after Elizabeth Cuthill and James McKee,E. Cuthill and J. McKeethe bandwidth of sparse symmetric matrices''In Proc. 24th Nat. Conf. Association for Computing Machinery, ACM, ...

and reverse Cuthill–McKee algorithm are heuristics for permuting matrices into forms with small

bandwidth Bandwidth commonly refers to: * Bandwidth (signal processing) or ''analog bandwidth'', ''frequency bandwidth'', or ''radio bandwidth'', a measure of the width of a frequency range * Bandwidth (computing), the rate of data transfer, bit rate or thr ...

and for associated problems in

graph bandwidth In graph theory, the graph bandwidth problem is to label the vertices of a graph with distinct integers so that the quantity \max\ is minimized ( is the edge set of ). The problem may be visualized as placing the vertices of a graph at disti ...

, named for the work of Cuthill with James McKee.

Education and career

Cuthill was born on October 16, 1923 in Connecticut, the daughter of Paul Richard Hahnemann and Barbara Baumann Hahnemann. She earned a master's degree in applied mathematics at Brown University in 1946, with a master's thesis "On the velocity distribution and stability of flow through a two-dimensional channel" supervised by

Chia-Chiao Lin Chia-Chiao Lin (; 7 July 1916 – 13 January 2013) was a Chinese-born American applied mathematician and Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Lin made major contributions to the theory of hydrodynamic stabilit ...

. After this, she completed a Ph.D. at the

University of Minnesota The University of Minnesota, formally the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, (UMN Twin Cities, the U of M, or Minnesota) is a public land-grant research university in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, Minnesota, United States. ...

in 1951; her dissertation, ''Integrals on Spaces of Functions which are Real and Continuous on Finite and Infinite Intervals'', was supervised by Robert Horton Cameron. While completing her doctorate, she became an instructor at

Purdue University Purdue University is a public land-grant research university in West Lafayette, Indiana, and the flagship campus of the Purdue University system. The university was founded in 1869 after Lafayette businessman John Purdue donated land and mone ...

. In 1953, she became a researcher for the

, working at the

, where she became Numerical Analysis Coordinator for the Computation, Mathematics, and Logistics Department. She died on January 11, 2011, in

Frederick, Maryland Frederick is a city in and the county seat of Frederick County, Maryland. It is part of the Baltimore–Washington Metropolitan Area. Frederick has long been an important crossroads, located at the intersection of a major north–south Native ...

Recognition

Cuthill was named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1963. In 1976, she won the David W. Taylor Award of the US Navy "for her valuable contributions in the development and exploitation of mathematical and computational techniques for significant Navy applications".

Selected publications

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Cuthill, Elizabeth 1923 births 2011 deaths 20th-century American mathematicians American women mathematicians Applied mathematicians Brown University alumni University of Minnesota alumni Female United States Navy civilians Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science 20th-century American women 21st-century American women