Ruth Silverman (born 1936 or 1937, died April 25, 2011) was an American mathematician and computer scientist known for her research in

computational geometry Computational geometry is a branch of computer science devoted to the study of algorithms which can be stated in terms of geometry. Some purely geometrical problems arise out of the study of computational geometric algorithms, and such problems ar ...

. She was one of the original founders of the Association for Women in Mathematics in 1971.

Education and career

Silverman completed a Ph.D. in 1970 at the University of Washington. She was a faculty member at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, an associate professor at Southern Connecticut State College, a computer science instructor at the University of the District of Columbia, and a researcher in the Center for Automation Research at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Contributions

Silverman's dissertation, ''Decomposition of plane convex sets'', concerned the characterization of compact convex sets in the

Euclidean plane In mathematics, the Euclidean plane is a Euclidean space of dimension two. That is, a geometric setting in which two real quantities are required to determine the position of each point ( element of the plane), which includes affine notions of ...

that cannot be formed as Minkowski sums of simpler sets. She became known for her research in

and particular for highly cited publications on

k-means clustering ''k''-means clustering is a method of vector quantization, originally from signal processing, that aims to partition ''n'' observations into ''k'' clusters in which each observation belongs to the cluster with the nearest mean (cluster centers or ...

and nearest neighbor search. Other topics in Silverman's research include robust statistics and small sets of points that meet every line in finite projective planes.

Selected publications

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Silverman, Ruth 2011 deaths American computer scientists 20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians American women computer scientists American women mathematicians Researchers in geometric algorithms University of Washington alumni New Jersey Institute of Technology faculty Southern Connecticut State University faculty University of the District of Columbia faculty Year of birth uncertain 20th-century women mathematicians 21st-century women mathematicians 20th-century American women 21st-century American women