Ellen Gethner is a US mathematician and computer scientist specializing in

graph theory In mathematics, graph theory is the study of ''graphs'', which are mathematical structures used to model pairwise relations between objects. A graph in this context is made up of '' vertices'' (also called ''nodes'' or ''points'') which are conne ...

who won the

Mathematical Association of America The Mathematical Association of America (MAA) is a professional society that focuses on mathematics accessible at the undergraduate level. Members include university, college, and high school teachers; graduate and undergraduate students; pure a ...

Chauvenet Prize The Chauvenet Prize is the highest award for mathematical expository writing. It consists of a prize of $1,000 and a certificate, and is awarded yearly by the Mathematical Association of America in recognition of an outstanding expository article ...

in 2002 with co-authors

Stan Wagon Stanley Wagon is a Canadian-American mathematician, a professor of mathematics at Macalester College in Minnesota. He is the author of multiple books on number theory, geometry, and computational mathematics, and is also known for his snow sculpt ...

and Brian Wick for their paper ''A stroll through the Gaussian Primes''.

Career

Gethner has two doctorates. She completed her first, a PhD in mathematics from

Ohio State University The Ohio State University, commonly called Ohio State or OSU, is a public land-grant research university in Columbus, Ohio. A member of the University System of Ohio, it has been ranked by major institutional rankings among the best publ ...

, in 1992; her dissertation, ''Rational Period Functions For The Modular Group And Related Discrete Groups'', was supervised by L. Alayne Parson. She completed a second PhD in computer science from the

University of British Columbia The University of British Columbia (UBC) is a public university, public research university with campuses near Vancouver and in Kelowna, British Columbia. Established in 1908, it is British Columbia's oldest university. The university ranks a ...

in 2002, with a dissertation ''Computational Aspects of Escher Tilings'' supervised by

Nick Pippenger Nicholas John Pippenger is a researcher in computer science. He has produced a number of fundamental results many of which are being widely used in the field of theoretical computer science, database processing and compiler optimization. He has ...

and David G. Kirkpatrick. Gethner is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at

University of Colorado Denver The University of Colorado Denver (CU Denver) is a Public university, public research university in Denver, Colorado. It is part of the University of Colorado system. History University of Colorado System Anschutz Medical Campus The University ...

Research

Gethner became interested in connections between geometry and art after a high school lesson using a kaleidoscope to turn a drawing into an Escher-like

tessellation A tessellation or tiling is the covering of a surface, often a plane (mathematics), plane, using one or more geometric shapes, called ''tiles'', with no overlaps and no gaps. In mathematics, tessellation can be generalized to high-dimensional ...

of the plane. This later inspired some of her research on

wallpaper pattern A wallpaper is a mathematical object covering a whole Euclidean plane by repeating a motif indefinitely, in manner that certain isometries keep the drawing unchanged. To a given wallpaper there corresponds a group of such congruent transformati ...

s and on converting music into visual patterns.

References

External links

* Living people Place of birth missing (living people) 21st-century American mathematicians American women mathematicians American computer scientists American women computer scientists Graph theorists Ohio State University Graduate School alumni University of British Columbia alumni University of Colorado Denver faculty 1960 births 21st-century American women {{US-compu-bio-stub