Person: Praeger, Cheryl Elisabeth

Cheryl Praeger is an Australian mathematician who has applied the ideas of symmetry to a wide variety of mathematical problems.

After leaving school Praeger enrolled in the University of Queensland and completed her four year B.Sc. degree in 1969.
Between her third and fourth years Praeger spent eight weeks at the Australian National University.
After completing her undergraduate course Praeger was offered a scholarship to undertake research at the Australian National University but she was also offered a Commonwealth Scholarship to study at the University of Oxford in England.
At Oxford, Praeger was in St Anne's College and assigned Peter Neumann (son of Bernhard Neumann and Hanna Neumann) as a supervisor for her research.
At ANU Praeger lived at University House and there she met a statistics research student John Henstridge.
In 1982 Praeger was promoted to Senior Lecturer, then to Professor of Mathematics less than a year later.
Praeger has one of the most stunning publication records of any mathematician.
Examples of papers in which Praeger looked at groups acting on structures are Symmetric graphs and a characterization of the odd graphs (1980) which investigates graphs with large groups of automorphisms.
Another topic to which Praeger had made major contributions is Computational Group Theory.
Praeger was immediately interested and she began an important line of research which has made major contributions to Computational Group Theory.
One of Praeger's most popular lecture topics at a lower level is on mathematics and weaving.
Praeger has received many honours for her mathematical contributions.

Born 7 September 1948, Toowoomba, Queensland, Australia.

View full biography at MacTutor

Group Theory, Origin Australia, Women

Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0!

O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive