Ruth Silverman

Ruth Silverman (born 1936 or 1937, died April 25, 2011)[1] was an American mathematician and computer scientist known for her research in computational geometry. She was one of the original founders of the Association for Women in Mathematics in 1971.[2][3]

Ruth Silverman
Born	1936 or 1937
Died	(2011-04-25)April 25, 2011, age 74
Academic background
Alma mater	University of Washington
Thesis	Decomposition of plane convex sets
Academic work
Discipline	Mathematics
Sub-discipline	computational geometry
Institutions	New Jersey Institute of Technology, Southern Connecticut State College, University of the District of Columbia, University of Maryland, College Park

Education and career

Silverman completed a Ph.D. in 1970 at the University of Washington.[4] She was a faculty member at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, an associate professor at Southern Connecticut State College,[5] a computer science instructor at the University of the District of Columbia, and a researcher in the Center for Automation Research at the University of Maryland, College Park.[1]

Contributions

Silverman's dissertation, Decomposition of plane convex sets,[4] concerned the characterization of compact convex sets in the Euclidean plane that cannot be formed as Minkowski sums of simpler sets.[6]

She became known for her research in computational geometry and particular for highly cited publications on k-means clustering^[KM] and nearest neighbor search.^[NN] Other topics in Silverman's research include robust statistics^[LT] and small sets of points that meet every line in finite projective planes.^[IP]

Selected publications

IP.	Erdős, P.; Silverman, R.; Stein, A. (1983), "Intersection properties of families containing sets of nearly the same size", Ars Combinatoria, 15: 247–259, MR 0706303

NN.	Arya, Sunil; Mount, David M.; Netanyahu, Nathan S.; Silverman, Ruth; Wu, Angela Y. (1998), "An optimal algorithm for approximate nearest neighbor searching in fixed dimensions", Journal of the ACM, 45 (6): 891–923, doi:10.1145/293347.293348, MR 1678846

KM.	Kanungo, T.; Mount, D. M.; Netanyahu, N. S.; Piatko, C. D.; Silverman, R.; Wu, A. Y. (2002), "An efficient k-means clustering algorithm: analysis and implementation", IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 24 (7): 881–892, doi:10.1109/tpami.2002.1017616

LT.	Mount, David M.; Netanyahu, Nathan S.; Piatko, Christine D.; Silverman, Ruth; Wu, Angela Y. (2014), "On the least trimmed squares estimator", Algorithmica, 69 (1): 148–183, doi:10.1007/s00453-012-9721-8, MR 3172284

References

1. "Ruth Silverman (age 74)", Paid death notices, Washington Post, April 28, 2011
2. Blum, Lenore (September 1991), "A Brief History of the Association for Women in Mathematics: The Presidents' Perspectives", Notices of the American Mathematical Society, 38 (7): 738–774, archived from the original on 2017-07-29, retrieved 2018-02-12. See section "What we did ... (In the beginning): Atlantic City".
3. Kenschaft, Patricia C. (2005), Change is Possible: Stories of Women and Minorities in Mathematics, American Mathematical Society, p. 131, ISBN 9780821837481
4. MathSciNet record for Silverman's dissertation: MR2620174
5. "News and Notices", American Mathematical Monthly, 86 (5): 418–420, May 1979, doi:10.1080/00029890.1979.11994820, JSTOR 2321116
6. Schneider, Rolf (2014), Convex bodies: the Brunn-Minkowski theory, Encyclopedia of Mathematics and its Applications, 151 (2nd ed.), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 168–169, ISBN 978-1-107-60101-7, MR 3155183

External links

• Case, B.A.; Leggett, A.M. (2016). Complexities: Women in Mathematics. Princeton University Press. p. 81. ISBN 978-1-4008-8016-4.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)