Elena Zoia Ceaușescu (Romanian pronunciation: [ˈzoja tʃauˈʃesku] 28 February 1949 – 20 November 2006) was a Romanian mathematician, the daughter of Communist leader Nicolae and his wife, Elena Ceaușescu.
She did her studies at the University of Bucharest. After completing her Ph.D. in mathematics, she worked as a researcher at the Institute of Mathematics of the Romanian Academy in Bucharest. Her field of specialization was functional analysis. Allegedly, her parents were unhappy with their daughter's choice of doing research in mathematics, so the Institute was disbanded in 1975. She moved on to work for Institutul pentru Creaţie Ştiinţifică şi Tehnică (INCREST, Institute for Scientific and Technical Creativity), where she eventually started and headed a new department of mathematics.
She was married in 1980 to Mircea Oprean, an engineer and professor at the Polytechnic University of Bucharest.
During the 1989 revolution, on 24 December 1989 she was arrested for "undermining the Romanian economy" and was released only eight months later, on 18 August 1990.[1] After she was freed, she tried unsuccessfully to return to her former job at INCREST, then gave up and retired.[2] After the revolution, some newspapers reported that she had lived a wild life, having plenty of lovers and often being drunk.[3]
After her parents were executed, the new government confiscated the house where she and her husband lived (the house was used as proof of allegedly stolen wealth), so she had to live with friends.
Zoia Ceaușescu believed that her parents were not buried in Ghencea Cemetery; she tried to have their remains exhumed, but a military court refused her request.
Zoia Ceaușescu was known to be an inveterate smoker.[4] She died of lung cancer in 2006, at age 57.
Zoia Ceaușescu published 22 scientific papers between 1976 and 1988. Some of those are: