Audrey Terras

Audrey Terras
Born September 10, 1942
Washington, D.C.
Residence San Diego, California
Fields Mathematics
Institutions University of California, San Diego
Alma mater Yale University
Doctoral advisor Tsuneo Tamagawa
Notable awards Fellow of the AAAS
Noether Lecturer
AWM/MAA Falconer Lecturer

Audrey Anne Terras (born September 10, 1942) is an American mathematician who works primarily in number theory. Her research has focused on quantum chaos and on various types of zeta functions.

Life and education

Audrey Terras was born September 10, 1942 in Washington, D.C.[1] She received a BS degree in mathematics from the University of Maryland, College Park in 1964, and MA and PhD degrees from Yale University in 1966 and 1970 respectively.[2] She stated in a 2008 interview that she chose to study mathematics because "The U.S. government paid me! And not much! It was the time of Sputnik, so we needed to produce more mathematicians, and when I was deciding between Math and History, they weren’t paying me to do history, they were paying me to do math."[3]

Career

Terras joined the University of California, San Diego as an assistant professor in 1972, and is now a full professor there.[2]

As an undergraduate Terras was inspired by her teacher Sigekatu Kuroda to become a number theorist; she was especially interested in the use of analytic techniques to get algebraic results. Today her research interests are in number theory, harmonic analysis on symmetric spaces and finite groups, special functions, algebraic graph theory, zeta functions of graphs, arithmetical quantum chaos, and the Selberg trace formula.[4]

Terras was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1982.[1] She was the Association for Women in Mathematics- Mathematical Association of America AWM/MAA Falconer Lecturer in 2000, speaking on "Finite Quantum Chaos,"[5] and the AWM's Noether Lecturer in 2008, speaking on "Fun with Zeta Functions of Graphs".[6] In 2012 she became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.[7]

Selected publications

Notes

  1. 1.0 1.1 "Biographies of Candidates 2000" (PDF). Notices of the American Mathematical Society 47 (8): 922–934. September 2000. Retrieved 2009-05-24.
  2. 2.0 2.1 "2000 AWM-MAA Invited Address: Audrey Terras". Association for Women in Mathematics. Retrieved 2009-05-25.
  3. "Interview with Audrey Terras" (PDF). UCSD Math Club Newsletter. University of California, San Diego. Fall 2008. pp. 1, 3. Retrieved 2009-05-26.
  4. "Audrey Terras's Home Page". University of California, San Diego. 2009-03-29. Retrieved 2009-05-27.
  5. "AWM Falconer Lectures". Association for Women in Mathematics. Archived from the original on 17 June 2009. Retrieved 2009-05-26.
  6. "Emmy Noether Lectures". Association for Women in Mathematics. Archived from the original on 26 April 2009. Retrieved 2009-05-25.
  7. List of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society, retrieved 2013-08-25.
  8. 8.0 8.1 Garrett, Paul B. (1990). "Review: Harmonic analysis on symmetric spaces and applications, by Audrey Terras" (PDF). Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. (N.S.) 22 (1): 219–230. doi:10.1090/s0273-0979-1990-15884-7.

Further reading

External links