Biography:Ruth Silverman

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Short description: American mathematician
Ruth Silverman
Born
1936 or 1937
Died(2011-04-25)April 25, 2011, age 74
Academic background
Alma materUniversity of Washington
ThesisDecomposition of plane convex sets
Academic work
DisciplineMathematics
Sub-disciplinecomputational geometry
InstitutionsNew Jersey Institute of Technology,
Southern Connecticut State College,
University of the District of Columbia,
University of Maryland, College Park

Ruth Silverman (born 1936 or 1937, died April 25, 2011)[1] was an American mathematician and computer scientist known for her research in computational geometry. She was one of the original founders of the Association for Women in Mathematics in 1971.[2][3]

Education and career

Silverman completed a Ph.D. in 1970 at the University of Washington.[4] She was a faculty member at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, an associate professor at Southern Connecticut State College,[5] 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.[1]

Contributions

Silverman's dissertation, Decomposition of plane convex sets,[4] concerned the characterization of compact convex sets in the Euclidean plane that cannot be formed as Minkowski sums of simpler sets.[6]

She became known for her research in computational geometry and particular for highly cited publications on k-means clustering[KM] and nearest neighbor search.[NN] Other topics in Silverman's research include robust statistics[LT] and small sets of points that meet every line in finite projective planes.[IP]

Selected publications

IP. "Intersection properties of families containing sets of nearly the same size", Ars Combinatoria 15: 247–259, 1983 
NN. Arya, Sunil (1998), "An optimal algorithm for approximate nearest neighbor searching in fixed dimensions", Journal of the ACM 45 (6): 891–923, doi:10.1145/293347.293348 
KM. Kanungo, T. (2002), "An efficient k-means clustering algorithm: analysis and implementation", IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 24 (7): 881–892, doi:10.1109/tpami.2002.1017616 
LT. "On the least trimmed squares estimator", Algorithmica 69 (1): 148–183, 2014, doi:10.1007/s00453-012-9721-8 

References

  1. 1.0 1.1 "Ruth Silverman (age 74)", Washington Post, April 28, 2011, http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/washingtonpost/obituary.aspx?n=ruth-silverman&pid=150618150 
  2. Blum, Lenore (September 1991), "A Brief History of the Association for Women in Mathematics: The Presidents' Perspectives", Notices of the American Mathematical Society 38 (7): 738–774, http://www.awm-math.org/articles/notices/199107/blum/index.html, retrieved 2018-02-12 . See section "What we did ... (In the beginning): Atlantic City".
  3. Kenschaft, Patricia C. (2005), Change is Possible: Stories of Women and Minorities in Mathematics, American Mathematical Society, p. 131, ISBN 9780821837481, https://books.google.com/books?id=FKK9yXRMNy8C&pg=PA131 
  4. 4.0 4.1 MathSciNet record for Silverman's dissertation: MR2620174
  5. "News and Notices", American Mathematical Monthly 86 (5): 418–420, May 1979, doi:10.1080/00029890.1979.11994820 
  6. Schneider, Rolf (2014), Convex bodies: the Brunn-Minkowski theory, Encyclopedia of Mathematics and its Applications, 151 (2nd ed.), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 168–169, ISBN 978-1-107-60101-7, https://books.google.com/books?id=VfbXAAAAQBAJ&pg=PA168 

External links

  • Case, B.A.; Leggett, A.M. (2016). Complexities: Women in Mathematics. Princeton University Press. p. 81. ISBN 978-1-4008-8016-4.