Audrey Terras | |
|---|---|
| Born | Audrey Bowdoin (1942-09-10)September 10, 1942 (age 82) |
| Alma mater | University of Maryland, College Park(BS) Yale University(MA,PhD) |
| Awards | Fellow of the AAAS Noether Lecturer AWM/MAA Falconer Lecturer |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Mathematics |
| Institutions | University of California San Diego |
| Doctoral advisor | Tsuneo Tamagawa |
| Doctoral students | Dorothy Wallace |
Audrey Anne Terras (born September 10, 1942) is an Americanmathematician who works primarily innumber theory. Her research has focused onquantum chaos and on various types ofzeta functions.
Audrey Terras was born September 10, 1942, inWashington, D.C.[1]She received aBS degree in mathematics from theUniversity of Maryland, College Park (UMD) in 1964, andMA andPhD degrees fromYale University in 1966 and 1970 respectively.[2] She was married to fellow UMD alumnusRiho Terras.[3] 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."[4]
Terras joined theUniversity of California, San Diego, as an assistant professor in 1972, and became a full professor there in 1983.[5] She retired in 2010,[5] and currently holds the title of Professor Emerita.[6]
As an undergraduate Terras was inspired by her teacherSigekatu Kuroda to become anumber theorist; she was especially interested in the use ofanalytic techniques to get algebraic results. Today her research interests are innumber theory,harmonic analysis onsymmetric spaces andfinite groups,special functions,algebraic graph theory,zeta functions ofgraphs, arithmeticalquantum chaos, and theSelberg trace formula.[5]
Terras was elected aFellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1982.[1] She was theAssociation for Women in Mathematics-Mathematical Association of AmericaAWM/MAA Falconer Lecturer in 2000, speaking on "Finite Quantum Chaos,"[7]and theAWM'sNoether Lecturer in 2008, speaking on "Fun with Zeta Functions of Graphs".[8] In 2012 she became a fellow of theAmerican Mathematical Society.[9]She is part of the 2019 class of fellows of theAssociation for Women in Mathematics.[10]
