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Bodil Branner

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Bodil Branner (born 5 February 1943, in Aarhus) is a retired Danish mathematician, one of the founders of European Women in Mathematics and a former chair of the Danish Mathematical Society. Her research concerned holomorphic dynamics and the history of mathematics.[1]

Education and career

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Branner studied mathematics and physics at Aarhus University, where mathematician Svend Bundgaard was one of her mentors, and in 1967 earned a master's degree (the highest degree then available) under the supervision of Leif Kristensen. She had intended to travel to the U.S. for a doctorate, but her husband, a chemist, took an industry job in Copenhagen. Branner could not get a job as a high school teacher because she did not have a teaching qualification, but Bundgaard found her a position as a faculty assistant for Frederik Fabricius-Bjerre at the Technical University of Denmark. Despite this not beginning as an actual faculty position, she eventually earned tenure there in the 1970s.[1]

European Women in Mathematics was founded as an organization in 1986 by Branner, Caroline Series, Gudrun Kalmbach, Marie-Françoise Roy, and Dona Strauss, inspired by the activities of the Association for Women in Mathematics in the USA.[2]

Branner was the first woman to lead the Danish Mathematical Society, which she did from 1998 to 2002.[3]

She retired in 2008.[1]

Recognition

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A symposium in honor of Branner's 60th birthday was held in Holbæk in 2003, and published as a festschrift in 2006.[4] In 2012, she became one of the inaugural fellows of the American Mathematical Society.[5]

Selected publications

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  • Branner, Bodil; Hubbard, John H. (1988), "The iteration of cubic polynomials. I. The global topology of parameter space", Acta Mathematica, 160 (3–4): 143–206, doi:10.1007/BF02392275, MR 0945011.
  • Branner, Bodil (1989), "The Mandelbrot set", Chaos and fractals (Providence, RI, 1988), Proc. Sympos. Appl. Math., vol. 39, Amer. Math. Soc., Providence, RI, pp. 75–105, doi:10.1090/psapm/039/1010237, MR 1010237.
  • Branner, Bodil; Hubbard, John H. (1992), "The iteration of cubic polynomials. II. Patterns and parapatterns", Acta Mathematica, 169 (3–4): 229–325, doi:10.1007/BF02392761, MR 1194004.
  • Branner, Bodil; Johansen, Nils Voje (1999), "Caspar Wessel (1745–1818). Surveyor and mathematician", Matematisk-fysiske Meddelelser, 46 (1): 9–61, MR 1956505.

References

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  1. ^ a b c Hjorth, Poul G. (June 2012), "Interview with Bodil Branner", Newsletter of the European Mathematical Society, 84, archived from the original on 2015-02-17, retrieved 2015-02-17
  2. ^ "European Women in Mathematics". MacTutor History of Mathematics archive. February 2018. Retrieved 2018-08-30.
  3. ^ Munkholm, Hans Jørgen (February 5, 2002), Bodil Branner og Dansk Matematisk Forening (in Danish), retrieved 2015-02-16.
  4. ^ Hjorth, Poul G.; Petersen, Carsten Lunde (2006), Dynamics on the Riemann sphere: A Bodil Branner Festschrift, Including papers from the Symposium on Holomorphic Dynamics held in Holbæk, June 2003, Zürich: European Mathematical Society (EMS), doi:10.4171/011, ISBN 3-03719-011-6, MR 2348951.
  5. ^ List of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society, retrieved 2015-02-16.
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