Biography:Helen F. Cullen

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Short description: American mathematician

Helen Frances Cullen (January 4, 1919 – August 25, 2007)[1] was an American mathematician specializing in topology. She worked for many years as a professor of mathematics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst[2] and was the first female faculty member in the mathematics department at Amherst.[3] She was known as the author of the book Introduction to General Topology (Heath, 1968),[4] as well as for her outspoken antisemitism.[5]

Education and career

Cullen was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts, and studied at Girls' Latin School and Radcliffe College.[2] She earned a master's degree at the University of Michigan in 1944,[6] and completed her Ph.D. at Michigan in 1950. Her dissertation, A Set of Parabolic Regular Curve Families Filling the Plane and Certain Related Reimann Surfaces, was supervised by Wilfred Kaplan.[7] She was a faculty member in the department of mathematics at Amherst from 1949 until her retirement as a professor emerita in 1992.[2]

Recognition

In 1998 the Girls' Latin School – Boston Latin Academy Association listed her as one of their outstanding alumnae.[3]

References

  1. "Deaths of AMS Members", Notices of the AMS 55 (5): 618, May 2008, https://www.ams.org/notices/200805/tx080500617p.pdf 
  2. 2.0 2.1 2.2 Obituary: Helen Cullen, professor emerita of Mathematics, UMassAmherst News & Media Relations, August 27, 2007, https://www.umass.edu/newsoffice/article/obituary-helen-cullen-professor-emerita-mathematics 
  3. 3.0 3.1 Outstanding alumnae/i, Girls' Latin School – Boston Latin Academy Association, Inc., http://blagls.org/main/alumnae_i/outstanding/ 
  4. Copeland, A. H. Jr., "Introduction to general topology", Mathematical Reviews 
  5. Tobin, Gary A.; Weinberg, Aryeh Kaufmann; Ferer, Jenna (2009), The UnCivil University: Intolerance on College Campuses, Lexington Books, p. 160, ISBN 9780739132685, https://books.google.com/books?id=tc1Bb2lVqqEC&pg=PA160 
  6. "Master of Arts", Proceedings of the Board of Regents, University of Michigan, August 1944, p. 666, https://books.google.com/books?id=1WLiAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA666 
  7. Helen F. Cullen at the Mathematics Genealogy Project