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Math In The News

March 29, 2010

The Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) presented the twentieth annual Alice T. Schafer Prize to Charmaine Sia, a senior at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

According to a press release from AWM, Sia maintains a perfect undergraduate transcript and excels in graduate courses. She is currently pursuing a double major in mathematics and physics with a minor in economics.

Sia also has extensive research experience. In 2007, she won the prize for best research from MIT's Summer Program in Undergraduate Research (SPUR) for her work on zero-sum problems in finite group theory. She spent the summer of 2008 participating in the Duluth REU program. While there she wrote a paper on classifying the orbits of special groups under the Hurwitz action and a paper on game chromatic numbers of products of graphs. Both were published. This past summer she participated in the SMALL research project where she co-authored two papers on knot theory.

Hannah Alpert, a third-year mathematics major at the University of Chicago, was also awarded the 2010 Schafer Prize. MAA profiled her in a Math in the News article last December.

Established in 1990, the prize is awarded for excellence in mathematics by an undergraduate woman. Alpert and Sia received the award at the 2010 Joint Mathematics Meetings in San Francisco.

Alice T. Schafer (MS’40, Ph. D.’42) came to the University of Chicago to study mathematics in 1939. She was a founding member and the second president of the Association for Women in Mathematics, which later named the award in her honor. Schafer taught at several colleges and universities, retiring from the mathematics faculty at Wellesley College in 1980. She continued to teach at Simmons College and Marymount University until she was 81.

Known as a champion of women in mathematics, Schafer received the MAA's 1998 award for distinguished service to mathematics. She passed away last September at the age of 94.

Source: Association for Women in Mathematics

 

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Monday, March 29, 0010