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Ellen Gethner

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Ellen Gethner
Born1960 (age 63–64)
United States
Occupation(s)Mathematician and Computer Scientist
Known forResearch in graph theory, winning the Mathematical Association of America's Chauvenet Prize in 2002

Ellen Gethner is a US mathematician and computer scientist specializing in graph theory who won the Mathematical Association of America's Chauvenet Prize[1] in 2002 with co-authors Stan Wagon and Brian Wick for their paper A stroll through the Gaussian Primes.[2]

Career

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Gethner has two doctorates. She completed her first, a PhD in mathematics from Ohio State University, 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 in 2002, with a dissertation Computational Aspects of Escher Tilings supervised by Nick Pippenger and David G. Kirkpatrick.[3] Gethner is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at University of Colorado Denver.[4]

Research

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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 of the plane. This later inspired some of her research on wallpaper patterns and on converting music into visual patterns.[5]

References

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  1. ^ "Chauvenet Prizes | Mathematical Association of America". Mathematical Association of America. Retrieved 2019-04-07.
  2. ^ Gethner, Ellen; Wagon, Stan; Wick, Brian (1998). "A Stroll Through the Gaussian Primes". American Mathematical Monthly. 105 (4): 327–337. doi:10.2307/2589708. ISSN 0002-9890. JSTOR 2589708.
  3. ^ Ellen Gethner at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  4. ^ "UC Denver faculty and staff directory".
  5. ^ "Making art from math". Impact. Vol. 3, no. 1. University of Colorado Denver College of Engineering and Applied Science. 2014. pp. 6–8.
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