Person: Rudin (2), Mary Ellen
Mary Ellen Rudin was an American mathematician known for herwork in general topology.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- Joe Estill was engaged on road building projects around Leakey, Texas and it was in that small isolated town that Mary Ellen was brought up.
- Mary Ellen attended the Leakey school, the only school of any kind within 60 miles of Leakey.
- Mary Ellen had registered for Moore's trigonometry class and she would take one of his classes every year until she graduated with her B.A. degree in 1944.
- R L Moore was not the only interesting mathematician whom Mary Ellen met at the University of Texas.
- In 1949 Walter Rudin, like Mary Ellen Estill, had just received his PhD in mathematics (from Duke instead of Texas) and he had accepted an Instructorship at Duke for that year also.
- In August of 1953 Mary Ellen and Walter decided to marry and she just arrived at Rochester as his wife.
- No one in the Rochester mathematics department worked in her field, but the University offered Mary Ellen a Temporary Part time Associate Professorship.
- For Mary Ellen it gave her legitimate access to the mathematical community and its seminars and library and demanded minimal time.
- In 1959 Walter Rudin accepted an appointment as a Full Professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
- The mathematics department there had a strong group of topologists very interested in Mary Ellen's research and they quickly arranged for her to receive an appointment as a Temporary part time, Lecturer in Mathematics which she enjoyed for 12 years.
- Mary Ellen and Walter's two sons were born in Madison, Robert Jefferson in 1961 and Charles Michel in 1964.
- To begin to understand why the Mathematics Department at the University of Wisconsin should have felt guilty that by 1971 Mary Ellen Rudin was still only a lecturer, we need to take a look at her remarkable mathematical achievements.
- Perhaps one of the most famous of these example was produced in 1970 when Rudin, using box products, constructed an example of a normal Hausdorff space whose Cartesian product with an interval is not normal.
- In August 1974 Rudin gave a series of lectures on set theoretic topology at the CBMS Regional Conference held at the University of Wyoming, Laramie.
- In 1981 Rudin became the first holder of the Grace Chisholm Young Professorship at Wisconsin.
- Over the last few years, however, Rudin has produced some very deep mathematical papers.
- Rudin has received many honours for her work, including at least four honorary doctorates, and will continue to receive further awards.
Born 7 December 1924, Hillsboro, Texas, USA. Died 18 March 2013, Madison, Wisconsin, USA.
View full biography at MacTutor
Tags relevant for this person:
Origin Usa, Topology, Women
Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0! 
- Github:
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- non-Github:
- @J-J-O'Connor
- @E-F-Robertson
References
Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:
- O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
