Rebecca Freja Goldin is an American mathematician who works as a professor of mathematical sciences at

George Mason University George Mason University (George Mason, Mason, or GMU) is a public research university in Fairfax County, Virginia with an independent City of Fairfax, Virginia postal address in the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Area. The university was origin ...

and director of the

Statistical Assessment Service Statistical Assessment Service (STATS) is a non-profit organization which analyzes and critiques the presentation of scientific findings and statistical evidence in the news media. Formerly associated with George Mason University and the Center f ...

, a nonprofit organization associated with GMU that aims to improve the use of

statistics Statistics (from German language, German: ''wikt:Statistik#German, Statistik'', "description of a State (polity), state, a country") is the discipline that concerns the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of ...

in journalism. Her mathematical research concerns

symplectic geometry Symplectic geometry is a branch of differential geometry and differential topology that studies symplectic manifolds; that is, differentiable manifolds equipped with a closed differential form, closed, nondegenerate form, nondegenerate different ...

, including work on

Hamiltonian action In mathematics, specifically in symplectic geometry, the momentum map (or, by false etymology, moment map) is a tool associated with a Hamiltonian action of a Lie group on a symplectic manifold, used to construct conserved quantities for the ac ...

s and symplectic quotients.

Education and career

After graduating with honors in mathematics from

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

,An Interview with Rebecca Goldin

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 ...

, October 31, 2008, retrieved 2016-06-30. Goldin studied in France for a year with

Bernard Teissier Bernard Teissier (; born 1945) is a French mathematician and a member of the Nicolas Bourbaki group. He has made major contributions to algebraic geometry and commutative algebra, specifically to singularity theory, multiplicity theory and va ...

at the

École Normale Supérieure École may refer to: * an elementary school in the French educational stages normally followed by secondary education establishments (collège and lycée) * École (river), a tributary of the Seine flowing in région Île-de-France * École, Savoi ...

,. pursuing research on

toric varieties In algebraic geometry, a toric variety or torus embedding is an algebraic variety containing an algebraic torus as an open dense subset, such that the action of the torus on itself extends to the whole variety. Some authors also require it to be no ...

. She completed her Ph.D. in 1999 at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

under the supervision of

Victor Guillemin Victor William Guillemin (born 1937 in Boston) is an American mathematician working in the field of symplectic geometry, who has also made contributions to the fields of microlocal analysis, spectral theory, and mathematical physics. He is a ten ...

. After postdoctoral research at the

University of Maryland The University of Maryland, College Park (University of Maryland, UMD, or simply Maryland) is a public land-grant research university in College Park, Maryland. Founded in 1856, UMD is the flagship institution of the University System of M ...

, she joined the GMU faculty in 2001.

Recognition

She was the inaugural winner of the

Ruth I. Michler Memorial Prize The Ruth I. Michler Memorial Prize is an annual prize in mathematics, awarded by the Association for Women in Mathematics to honor outstanding research by a female mathematician who has recently earned tenure. The prize funds the winner to spend a ...

of the

Association for Women in Mathematics 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 o ...

(AWM), in 2007.. She was also the 2008

AWM/MAA Falconer Lecturer The Etta Z. Falconer Lecture is an award and lecture series which honors "women who have made distinguished contributions to the mathematical sciences or mathematics education". It is sponsored by the Association for Women in Mathematics and the Ma ...

, speaking on "The Use and Abuse of Statistics in the Media". She was included in the 2019 class of fellows of the

American Mathematical Society The American Mathematical Society (AMS) is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, and serves the national and international community through its publications, meetings, ...

"for contributions to differential geometry and service to the mathematical community, particularly in support of promoting mathematical and statistical thinking to a wide audience".

References

External links

Home page
{{DEFAULTSORT:Goldin, Rebecca Freja Year of birth missing (living people) Living people 20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians American women mathematicians American statisticians Women statisticians Harvard College alumni Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni George Mason University faculty Fellows of the American Mathematical Society 20th-century women mathematicians 21st-century women mathematicians 20th-century American women 21st-century American women