Ruth I. Michler

Ruth I. Michler (born March 8, 1967 in Ithaca (City, New York) , New York ; † November 1, 2000 in Boston ) was an American-born mathematician of German descent who lived and researched in the United States. She mainly worked in the field of cyclic homology and singularity theory . The Ruth I. Michler Memorial Prize is awarded in her honor.

Life and research

Michler was born in Ithaca when her father, Gerhard O. Michler, was doing postdoctoral studies at Cornell University . She returned to Germany with her family in 1968 and spent the first six years of her life in Tübingen . Since 1973 she attended elementary school and then first a grammar school in Gießen , then until 1985 a grammar school in Essen . She then studied mathematics at the University of Oxford at Balliol College . In 1987 she won a Jenkyns Essay Prize for her work "Black Holes" under the direction of Roger Penrose , Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at Oxford University. After completing her Bachelor's degree from the University of Oxford, she studied at the University of California at Berkeley from 1988 . She did her PhD in 1993 with Mariusz Wodzicki with the dissertation Hodge-components of Cyclic Homology of Singular Affine Hypersurfaces . In 1992 she presented an article summarizing her dissertation at the K-theory conference in Strasbourg , which was published in the proceedings of the conference. From 1993 to 1994 she was a postdoctoral fellow at Queen's University in Kingston , Canada . In 1994 she was offered a tenure-track position at the University of North Texas at Denton , where she taught various courses, including a graduate course in financial mathematics that she had designed and was later promoted to associate professor. She has attended and lectured at conferences in many different countries around the world. She was awarded a National Science Foundation Fellowship for Women in Research and Teaching to attend Northeastern University's math department for the 2000-2001 academic year and work with Tony Iarrobino and Marc Levine . In 2000, she died in a bicycle accident one block from the math department. At the time of her death, she organized two conferences: "Résolution des singularités et géométrie non commutative", which was held from July 20-22, 2001 at the Center International de Rencontres Mathématiques in Luminy, France , and a conference on algebraic geometry, held by Held in Annapolis, Maryland , October 25-28, 2001 . Both conferences were held in her memory and a book on the flow of both conferences, entitled "Topics in Algebraic and Non-Commutative Geometry," was published by the American Mathematical Society in 2003. To honor them and the careers of accomplished young mathematicians The Michler family made a $ 1 million donation to help establish the Ruth I. Michler Memorial Award for the Association for Women in Mathematics at Cornell. The award provides the winner with a scholarship to spend one semester in the math department at Cornell University without teaching commitments.

Michler was also a dedicated long-distance runner, having completed over 23 marathons in six years, including the Boston Marathon . She had started running "ultra marathons" and completed the 100-mile Leadville Trail in Texas in 1999 and the 100-kilometer Chancellor Challenge in Boston in October 2000, finishing 10th among the women. She ran the Cape Cod Marathon on October 29, 2000, barely two weeks after the 100 km race.

Publications (selection)

• Caroline Grant Melles, Ruth I. Michler: Singularities in Algebraic and Analytic Geometry (Contemporary Mathematics), 2001, ISBN 978-0821820056
• Ruth I. Michler, Jean-Paul Brasselet, Gary Kennedy, Kristin Lauter, Lee McWwan, Caroline Grant Melles: Topics in Algebraic and Noncommutative Geometry (English), 2003, ISBN 978-0821832097

Web links

• Ruth I. Michler in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)
• Biography with Agnes Scott
• Biography at Cornell University
• Ruth I. Michler Memorial Prizes
• The Ruth I Michler Memorial Prize of the AWM
• Publications
• In memoriam - AWM