The following dedication was written by Caroline Melles and published
in Topics
in Algebraic and Noncommutative Geometry: Proceedings in Memory of
Ruth Michler,
Contemporary Mathematics Series 324, American Mathematical
Society, 2003. It is reproduced here with permission from the American
Mathematical Society.
Dedication to Ruth Michler
This volume of proceedings of two conferences which took place in
2001, one in France and the other in the United States, is dedicated
to Dr. Ruth Ingrid Michler, without whose inspiration and energy neither
of these conferences would have taken place. Ruth died tragically
on November 1, 2000, at the age of thirty-three, but she is remembered
vividly by her family and her many friends and colleagues around the
world.
In the two years before her death, Ruth co-organized
three special sessions at American Mathematical Society meetings —
at the January national meetings in San Antonio and Washington, D.C.
in 1999 and 2000 respectively, and the regional meeting in San Francisco
in October of 2000. Ruth had many ideas for making these special
sessions mathematically stimulating and congenial. She scheduled
longer talks than usual, to allow participants to speak in greater
depth about their research. She drew on her wide circle of mathematical
acquaintances and successfully persuaded many mathematicians from across
North America and Europe to participate. She organized social events
and evening problem sessions, to provide more opportunities for participants
to interact informally. The special sessions were so successful
that she felt encouraged to organize a larger meeting. She suggested
a conference in Annapolis, Maryland, in 2001, concentrating on algebraic
geometry, commutative algebra, and computational methods. She also
wanted to broaden her circle of participants by organizing a summer
2001 meeting in France, where she had made many mathematical friends
during her travels. In her typical energetic fashion, Ruth immediately
drafted an application for funds for the Annapolis conference and started
putting together lists of potential speakers for both conferences.
After the initial shock and disbelief on hearing of Ruth’s death,
Jean-Paul Brasselet and I decided to continue with plans for a meeting
in France in the summer of 2001, and dedicate it to Ruth’s memory.
Emil Volcheck stepped in and provided invaluable assistance in the
early planning stages of the Annapolis conference. Soon afterwards,
Lee McEwan, Gary Kennedy, and Kristin Lauter joined me as co-organizers
of this conference, which was held in October of 2001 in Annapolis.
At both conferences, at the University of North
Texas, and at Northeastern University, where Ruth was working at the
time of her death, memorial sessions were held to commemorate this mathematician
who had made so many friends and had so much influence in such a short
career. Friends and colleagues shared their memories of Ruth and
tried to express what it was about her that made her so special. Their
testimony returned again and again to her outgoing and friendly
nature, and her extraordinary energy and enthusiasm. She was
generous with her time and especially helpful to other young female
mathematicians, encouraging them and inviting them to give talks. Ruth
was not only a mathematician, but also a dedicated long-distance runner,
a classical music lover, and a world traveler.
Ruth was born in Ithaca, New York on March
8, 1967, while her father, also a mathematician, was visiting Cornell
University. Ruth’s family was from Germany, and that is where
she grew up — in Tuebingen, Giessen, and eventually Essen. For undergraduate
work, Ruth chose the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, where
she was affiliated with Balliol College. Her tutors there were
Keith Hannabuss and Frances Kirwan. While at Oxford, Ruth distinguished
herself by winning the Jenkyns prize with an essay on “Black
Holes” under
the direction of Roger Penrose. Ruth graduated from Oxford with
a B.A. Summa Cum Laude in mathematics in 1988.
After receiving her B.A., Ruth traveled to
the United States for graduate work at the University of California,
Berkeley. She worked under the direction of Mariusz Wodzicki and
Arthus Ogus, completing her Ph.D. in 1993. Her dissertation was
titled “Hodge components of cyclic homology of affine hypersurfaces.”
In the difficult job market of the 1990’s,
when many of Ruth’s Berkeley classmates left academia for jobs
far removed from their thesis topics, Ruth was excited by her invitation
from Leslie Roberts to work as a postdoctoral fellow at Queen’s
University in Kingston, Canada. A year later, in 1994, Ruth accepted
a tenure-track position at the University of North Texas in Denton.
Ruth had tremendous energy and traveled considerably
over the next few years, giving talks at conferences in North America,
Europe, and Africa. Wherever she went she quickly made new friends. Her
visit to France one summer to work with Monique Lejeune-Jalabert and
Bernard Teissier led to visits by both Teissier and Lejeune-Jalabert
to the University of North Texas. I met Ruth in 1997 at the Fields
Institute in Toronto, Canada. Our meeting and friendship led to
the three special sessions which we co-organized at AMS meetings and
a book of proceedings from the first special session. Ruth was also very
active in the local mathematics community in Texas. She organized
a joint seminar for the University of North Texas, the University of
Texas at Arlington, and Texas Christian University, called AGANT (Algebraic
Geometry, Algebra, and Number Theory). As an instructor of mathematics,
Ruth taught a variety of courses, including a graduate course on financial
mathematics which she designed. She served as acting director of
the Integration Bee for the UNT Math Awareness Week and traveled to recruit
graduate students for the University of North Texas. In recognition
of her achievements and her contributions, both to UNT and the larger
mathematical community, Ruth was promoted to Associate Professor at
the University of North Texas, effective September 1, 2000.
Ruth continued to look for opportunities to
make new contacts and do mathematics with other people in her field.
She applied for and received a National Science Foundation Professional
Opportunities for Women in Research and Education (POWRE) Fellowship
to visit the Mathematics Department of Northeastern University in 2000–2001
to work with Tony Iarrobino and Marc Levine. By the fall of 2000, Ruth’s
future was looking bright. She had received her tenure and was in Boston
for the year to work on research. The book of proceedings of her
first conference was about to be published. She was developing
new results — on the blackboard of her office was a short proof of
a new theorem, written October 31, 2000. She was also applying for
a Bunting Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study,
to extend her stay in the Boston area. On November 1, 2000, Ruth
was run over by a heavy piece of construction equipment while waiting
in front of a red traffic light to cross Huntington Avenue at the corner
with Forsyth Street in Boston.
In memory of her energy, enthusiasm,
and friendship, the proceedings of the CIRM conference on Résolution
des singularités et géométrie non commutative,
July 20–22, 2001 and the Annapolis Algebraic Geometry Conference,
October 25–28, 2001 are dedicated to Ruth Michler.
