Yael Dowker

Yael Dowker in New Orleans, 1961.

Yael Naim Dowker (1919-2016, born as Yael Naim) was an Israeli-English mathematician, prominent especially due to her work in the fields of measure theory, ergodic theory and topological dynamics.

Biography

Born in Tel Aviv she eventually went to study in the United States at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. As a graduate student, in 1941 she met Clifford Hugh Dowker, a Canadian topologist working as an instructor there. The couple married in 1944. During the period between 1943 and 1946 the two of them worked together at the Radiation Laboratory at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Clifford also working as a civilian adviser for the United States Air Force during World War II.^[1]

Eventually Yael became a doctoral student at Radcliffe College (in Cambridge, Massachusetts), with Witold Hurewicz (a Polish mathematician known for the Hurewicz theorem) as her advisor. She published her thesis Invariant measure and the ergodic theorems in 1947 and received her Ph.D in 1948.^[2] In the period between 1948 and 1949, she did post-doctoral work at the Institute for Advanced Study, located in Princeton, New Jersey. A few years after the war, McCarthyism became a common phenomenon in the academic world, with several of the Dowker couple's friends in the mathematical community harassed, and one arrested. In 1950, they made the decision to emigrate to the United Kingdom.^[1]

In 1951 Yael took service as a professor at the University of Manchester,^[3] and later went on as a professor at the Imperial College London. While there, among the students she advised was Bill Parry, who published his thesis in 1960.^[2] She also cooperated on some of her work with the Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős. With her husband, Yael also helped educate over thirty "gifted children".^[1]

Works

• Invariant measure and the ergodic theorems, Duke Math. J. 14 (1947), 1051–1061
• Finite and $\sigma$-finite measures, Annals of Mathematics, 54 (1951), 595–608
• The mean and transitive points of homeomorphisms, Annals of Mathematics, 58 (1953), 123–133
• On limit sets in dynamical systems, Proc. London Math. Soc. 4 (1954), 168–176 (with Friedlander, F. G.)
• On minimal sets in dynamical systems, Quart. J. Math. Oxford Ser. (2) 7 (1956), 5–16
• Some examples in ergodic theory, Proc. London Math. Soc. 9 (1959), 227–241 (with Erdős, Paul)

References

1. James, I. M.; Kronheimer, E. H. (31 January 1985). Aspects of Topology: In Memory of Hugh Dowker 1912–1982. Cambridge University Press. pp. 11–12. ISBN 978-0-521-27815-7.
2. "Yael Dowker". Mathematics Genealogy Project. Retrieved 14 October 2015.
3. "Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society". American Mathematical Society. 1951: 100.