Melanie Matchett Wood (born 1981)[1] is an American mathematician and Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University[2] who was the first woman to qualify for the U.S. International Mathematical Olympiad Team. She completed her PhD in 2009 at Princeton University (under Manjul Bhargava). Previously, she was Chancellor's Professor of Mathematics at UC Berkeley, Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Mathematics at the University of Wisconsin, and spent 2 years as Szegö Assistant Professor at Stanford University.
Melanie Wood | |
|---|---|
 Wood in 2019 | |
| Born | 1981 (age 42–43) Indianapolis, Indiana |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | Duke University Trinity College, Cambridge Princeton University |
| Awards | Morgan Prize (2004) NSF CAREER Award (2017) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Mathematics |
| Institutions | Stanford University University of Wisconsin University of California, Berkeley Harvard University |
| Thesis | Moduli spaces for rings and ideals (2009) |
| Doctoral advisor | Manjul Bhargava |
She is a number theorist; more specifically, her research centers on arithmetic statistics, with excursions into related questions in arithmetic geometry and probability theory.[citation needed]
Early life
editWood was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, to Sherry Eggers and Archie Wood, both middle school teachers. Her father, who taught mathematics, died of cancer when Wood was six weeks old.[3]
While a high school student at Park Tudor School in Indianapolis, Wood (then aged 16) became the first female American to make the U.S. International Mathematical Olympiad Team, receiving silver medals in the 1998 and 1999 International Mathematical Olympiad.[4] Wood was also a cheerleader and student newspaper editor at her school.[5]
Awards
editIn 2002, she received the Alice T. Schafer Prize from the Association for Women in Mathematics.
In 2003, Wood graduated from Duke University where she won a Gates Cambridge Scholarship, Fulbright fellowship (declined to accept the Gates Cambridge Scholarship), and a National Science Foundation graduate fellowship, in addition to becoming the first American woman and second woman overall to be named a Putnam Fellow in 2002.[2][6][7][8]
During the 2003–2004 school year, she studied at Cambridge University. She was also named the Deputy Leader of the U.S. team that finished second overall at the 2005 International Mathematical Olympiad.[9]
In 2004, she won the Morgan Prize for work in two topics, Belyi-extending maps and P-orderings, making her the first woman to win this award.[4][8]
In 2012, she became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.[10]
In 2017, she received an NSF CAREER Award.
In 2018, she received the AWM-Microsoft Research Prize in Algebra and Number Theory from the Association for Women in Mathematics.[11]
From 2019 to 2021, Wood was an American Mathematical Society (AMS) Council member at large.[12]
In 2021, she received the NSF Alan T. Waterman Award.[13]
In 2022, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.[14]
Selected publications
edit- Wood, Melanie (2019). "Nonabelian Cohen-Lenstra moments. With an appendix by the author and Philip Matchett Wood". Duke Math. J. 168, no. 3, 377–427. MR 3909900.
- Vakil, Ravi; Wood, Melanie (2015). "Discriminants in the Grothendieck ring". Duke Math. J. 164, no. 6, 1139–1185. MR 3336842.
- Wood, Melanie (2011). "Gauss composition over an arbitrary base". Advances in Mathematics. 226 (2): 1756–1771. arXiv:1007.5285. doi:10.1016/j.aim.2010.08.018. MR 2737799.
- Wood, Melanie (2010). "On the probabilities of local behaviors in abelian field extensions". Compos. Math. 146, no. 1, 102–128. MR 2581243
- Wood, Melanie (2003). "P-orderings: a metric viewpoint and the non-existence of simultaneous orderings". Journal of Number Theory. 99 (1): 36–56. doi:10.1016/S0022-314X(02)00056-2. MR 1957243.
References
edit- ^ "AWM Essay Contest: Leena Shah". Retrieved November 11, 2014.
- ^ a b "Melanie Matchett Wood" (PDF). math.berkeley.edu. Retrieved 2019-07-27.
- ^ Olson, Steven (2005). Count Down: Six Kids Vie for Glory at the World's Toughest Math Competition. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. p. 18. ISBN 0-618-56212-5.
- ^ a b "Melanie Wood Interview". Retrieved 11 November 2014.
- ^ Rimer, Sara (2008-10-10). "Math Skills Suffer in U.S., Study Finds". New York Times. Retrieved 2008-10-10.
- ^ "Duke Magazine-Where Are They Now?-January/February 2010". Retrieved November 11, 2014.
- ^ "Cogito - Melanie Wood: The Making of a Mathematician". Archived from the original on 2010-07-07. Retrieved 2014-02-10.
- ^ a b Profile, ams.org. Accessed November 15, 2022.
- ^ "2005 IMO US Team Results | Mathematical Association of America". maa.org. Retrieved 2020-10-27.
- ^ List of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society. Retrieved 2013-09-01.
- ^ "AWM-Microsoft Research Prize in Algebra and Number Theory 2018". Association for Women in Mathematics. Retrieved January 26, 2019.
- ^ "AMS Committees". American Mathematical Society. Retrieved 2023-03-29.
- ^ "NSF recognizes a mathematician and a social scientist with the Alan T. Waterman Award". nsf.gov. Retrieved 2021-05-13.
- ^ "Harvard Math Professor Melanie Matchett Wood Wins 'Genius Grant'". thecrimson.com.
External links
edit- An Interview with Melanie Matchett Wood (The Girls' Angle Bulletin, April 2008)
- A Conversation with Melanie Wood (Math Horizons magazine, September 2004)
- The Girl Who Loved Math (Discover magazine)
- Melanie Wood: The Making of a Mathematician (Duke University profile)
- Melanie Wood (homepage at the University of California, Berkeley)
- Rimer, Sara (October 10, 2008). "Math Skills Suffer in U.S., Study Finds". New York Times.
- Melanie Wood at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
- Melanie Wood's results at International Mathematical Olympiad