Happy Mom’s Day

Mary Kay Farley, my dear wife’s mom, and Dorothy Lipton, my mom, have unfortunately both passed away. Kathryn and I miss them greatly. Both women shared keen mathematical skills, a fascination with the game of baseball and a commitment to living a well-ordered life.

Today is not Mother’s Day. We still hope all mothers everywhere are enjoying their day.

We will take this time to thank all of you out there. We missed doing so last month, but the pandemic has distended time anyway. What we are hearing now are stories of mothers and children and grandchildren finally being able to think of seeing each other in person rather than via video.

Another Kind of Parentage

This has blended with musings on our recent post in which I (Dick) noted that Dorit Aharonov is an academic grandchild of mine, in that Avi Wigderson co-supervised her doctoral thesis and I supervised Avi’s.

Years ago we featured on Father’s Day a post with the title “Who’s Your Doktorvater?”—which was a play on the expression “who’s your daddy?” Now it is high time to note that there are many “doctor mothers”—as Dorit has herself become.

One difference from human genealogy is that most often there is only one “doctor parent.” My advisor, David Parnas, has two: Alan Perlis and Everard Williams. From Perlis it is a straight shot back to Siméon Poisson, whose 1800 dissertation was co-advised by Joseph Lagrange and Pierre Laplace. For Lagrange there is a strange note of Leonhard Euler as a virtual advisor, but the real one is Giovanni Beccaria—who has no listed parent. Going through Laplace also dead-ends. But selecting Euler includes a chain that ends in the 1100s with Sharaf al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī, who improved the complexity of approximately solving cubic equations.

I appear not to have any female ancestors in my doctoral genealogy. I have two female PhD graduates, one of whom is a Doktormutter. Ken’s first female doctoral student, co-advised, had a successful thesis defense last week; he has another nearing the ABD stage. But I have known quite a few other “doctor mothers” personally. Today, Ken and I thought to recognize them.

Some Doctor Moms I Know

Here are some that I have had the honor to know. They are in a certain order—do you see what it is? I give only the surname on purpose—click the second name and note its URL for a singular reflection of this.

• Lam: advisees

• Blum: co-advisees

• Shaw: advisees

• Chung: advisees

• Klawe: advisee

• Lynch: advisees

• Bajcsy: advisees

• Graham: advisees

• Liskov: advisees

• Tardos: advisees

• Gilbert: advisees

• Randall: advisees

• Rasiowa: advisees

• Greibach: advisees

• Goldwasser: advisees

• Daubechies: advisees

The last gives us an all-female tree, not just one branch, of people we know. Besides Anna Gilbert, another of Ingrid Daubechies’s students, who herself has advisees, is Cynthia Rudin of Duke, whom Ken knew and taught while she was an undergraduate at Buffalo.

There are others I could mention who went into research labs where there are different relationships besides PhD advising. They include Irene Greif, Tal Rabin, Lynn Conway, and Jean Sammet. I could include Jamie Morgenstern, whom we recently featured and who his advising her first students at the University of Washington—do they have to be “born” yet to count you as a Doktormutter? I’ve left others out—apologies for that—but the ones I’ve listed make a nice collage:

My Upbringing

Of these, the one with the most formative impact on me was Helena Rasiowa. I learned advanced logic from her when I was an undergraduate.

Here is a tribute to her by Melvin Fitting:

I once heard Dana Scott criticize her book, The Mathematics of Metamathematics with Roman Sikorski, because, while it took an algebraic approach to logic, it did not carry the work further and consider set theory. If it had, then forcing would have been discovered years earlier than it was. This is not, at heart, a criticism, but a tribute. The building of mathematics always goes on. Foundations, firmly laid, enable later construction, and the foundations laid by that book were powerfully firm.

Ken also points to logic as a formative influence—though from men at Oxford. Both of us were attracted to Gödel-type undecidability issues in complexity theory in the early 1980s. The nexus of logic and algebra has been important to us in different ways, Ken more with finite automata and descriptive complexity. Courses in logic gave both of us a habit of framing problems along formal lines.

Open Problems

Which “doctor mothers” have you known or been influenced by?

[Added and re-formatted photos at top]