Elizabeth Wilmer

Elizabeth Lee Wilmer is an American mathematician known for her work on Markov chain mixing times. She is a professor, and former department head, of mathematics at Oberlin College.[1]

As a 16-year-old high school student at Stuyvesant High School and captain of the school mathematics team, Wilmer won second place in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search in 1987, for a project involving 3-coloring of graphs.[2][3][4] The first place winner that year was also female, marking the first year that the top two prizes both went to women.[5][6] As an undergraduate at Harvard University, she led the university's mathematics team,[7] which under her leadership won the first Mathematical Contest in Modeling of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, and she was one of the two inaugural winners of the Alice T. Schafer Prize of the Association for Women in Mathematics for excellence by a woman in undergraduate mathematics.[8][9][10] She graduated from Harvard in 1991, and completed her Ph.D. at Harvard in 1999.[1] She worked with Persi Diaconis for her doctoral dissertation, Exact Rates of Convergence for Some Simple Non-Reversible Markov Chains,[11] but after Diaconis moved from Harvard to Stanford in 1997 her official doctoral advisor became Joe Harris.[12]

With David A. Levin and Yuval Peres, Wilmer is the author of the textbook Markov Chains and Mixing Times (American Mathematical Society, 2009; 2nd ed., 2017).[13]

References
  1. Elizabeth Wilmer, Professor of Mathematics, Oberlin College, 2016-10-28, archived from the original on 2019-09-23, retrieved 2019-11-23
  2. Verhovek, Sam Howe (March 3, 1987), "Two girls win Westinghouse Competition", The New York Times, archived from the original on November 30, 2018, retrieved November 23, 2019
  3. "Whiz kids believe calculator use could add up to a bad mistake for young students", Los Angeles Times, November 21, 1987
  4. Zaslavsky, Claudia (1993), Multicultural Mathematics: Interdisciplinary Cooperative-learning Activities, Walch Publishing, p. 111, ISBN 9780825121814
  5. Leary, Warren E. (March 2, 1987), Chicago-Area Student Wins Top Prize in Westinghouse Science Contest, Associated Press
  6. Davis, Cynthia J.; West, Kathryn (1996), Women Writers in the United States: A Timeline of Literary, Cultural, and Social History, Oxford University Press, p. 404, ISBN 9780195090536
  7. "The Mathematics Student". 1991.
  8. First Annual Alice T. Schafer Prize, Association for Women in Mathematics, archived from the original on 2016-06-16, retrieved 2019-11-23
  9. Gallian, Joseph A. (June–July 2019), "The First Twenty-Five Winners of the AWM Alice T. Schafer Prize" (PDF), Notices of the American Mathematical Society, 66 (6): 870–874, doi:10.1090/noti1892, archived (PDF) from the original on 2019-07-08, retrieved 2019-11-24
  10. Mathematical Education, 1990
  11. Elizabeth Wilmer at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  12. PhD Dissertations, Harvard Department of Mathematics, retrieved 2019-11-24
  13. Reviews of Markov Chains and Mixing Times:
    • Mai, H. M., zbMATH, Zbl 1160.60001CS1 maint: untitled periodical (link)
    • Lakatos, László, zbMATH, Zbl 1390.60001CS1 maint: untitled periodical (link)
    • Häggström, Olle (2010), Mathematical Reviews, MR 2466937CS1 maint: untitled periodical (link)
    • Aldous, David (March 2019), The Mathematical Intelligencer, 41 (1): 90–91, doi:10.1007/s00283-018-9839-x, MR 3918079CS1 maint: untitled periodical (link)
    • Konstantopoulos, Takis (2019), SIAM Review, 61 (3): 631–634, doi:10.1137/19N974865, MR 3989422CS1 maint: untitled periodical (link)
    • Durrett, Richard (September 2019), "Review", MAA Reviews
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