Mary Ellen Rudin (December 7, 1924 - March 18, 2013) was an American mathematician. Born Mary Ellen Estill, she attended the University of Texas, completing her B.A. in 1944 and her Ph.D. in 1949, under Robert Lee Moore. In 1953, she married the mathematician Walter Rudin. Following her mentor Moore, her research centered on point-set topology. She was appointed as Professor of Mathematics at the University of Wisconsin in 1971, and after retirement served as a Professor Emerita there. She served as vice-president of the American Mathematical Society, 1980–1981. In 1984 she was selected to be a Noether Lecturer. She was an honorary member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (1995). Rudin is best known in topology for her constructions of counterexamples to well-known conjectures. Most famously, she was the first to construct a Dowker space, thus disproving a conjecture of Dowker's that had stood, and helped drive topological research, for more than twenty years. She also proved the first Morita conjecture and a restricted version of the second. Her latest major result is a proof of Nikiel's conjecture. Rudin's Erdős number is 1. "Reading the articles of Mary Ellen Rudin, studying them until there is no mystery takes hours and hours; but those hours are rewarded, the student obtains power to which few have access. They are not hard to read, they are just hard mathematics, that's all. " (Steve Watson) She resided in Madison, Wisconsin, in the Rudin House, a home designed by architect Frank Lloyd Wright.
Fecha de nacimiento
1924-12-07
Fecha de defunción
2013-03-18
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