Mary Elizabeth Flahive (born 1948) is a professor of mathematics at

Oregon State University Oregon State University (OSU) is a public land-grant, research university in Corvallis, Oregon. OSU offers more than 200 undergraduate-degree programs along with a variety of graduate and doctoral degrees. It has the 10th largest engineering ...

. Her research interests are in

number theory Number theory (or arithmetic or higher arithmetic in older usage) is a branch of pure mathematics devoted primarily to the study of the integers and integer-valued functions. German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) said, "Ma ...

; she is the author of two books on

difference equation In mathematics, a recurrence relation is an equation according to which the nth term of a sequence of numbers is equal to some combination of the previous terms. Often, only k previous terms of the sequence appear in the equation, for a parameter ...

s and

Diophantine approximation In number theory, the study of Diophantine approximation deals with the approximation of real numbers by rational numbers. It is named after Diophantus of Alexandria. The first problem was to know how well a real number can be approximated by r ...

, and is also interested in the

geometry of numbers Geometry of numbers is the part of number theory which uses geometry for the study of algebraic numbers. Typically, a ring of algebraic integers is viewed as a lattice in \mathbb R^n, and the study of these lattices provides fundamental informa ...

and algebraic coding theory.

Education

Flahive graduated from St. Joseph's College in New York in 1969. She completed her Ph.D. at the

Ohio State University The Ohio State University, commonly called Ohio State or OSU, is a public land-grant research university in Columbus, Ohio. A member of the University System of Ohio, it has been ranked by major institutional rankings among the best pub ...

in 1976. Her dissertation, ''On The Minima Of Indefinite Binary Quadratic Forms'', was supervised by Alan C. Woods, and cites the mentorship of another Ohio State mathematician, Jill Yaqub. She published it under the name Mary Flahive Gbur, and some of her journal papers from this period use the name Mary E. Gbur.

Books

Flahive is the author of the book ''The Markoff and Lagrange Spectra'', on topics related to Diophantine approximation (with Thomas W. Cusick,

Mathematical Surveys and Monographs ''Mathematical Surveys and Monographs'' is a Monographic series, series of monographs published by the American Mathematical Society. Each volume in the series gives a survey of the subject along with a brief introduction to recent developments a ...

30,

American Mathematical Society The American Mathematical Society (AMS) is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, and serves the national and international community through its publications, meeting ...

, 1989). She is also the author of an undergraduate textbook on

s, '' Difference Equations: From Rabbits to Chaos'' (with Paul Cull and Robby Robson,

Undergraduate Texts in Mathematics Undergraduate Texts in Mathematics (UTM) (ISSN 0172-6056) is a series of undergraduate-level textbooks in mathematics published by Springer-Verlag. The books in this series, like the other Springer-Verlag mathematics series, are small yellow bo ...

, Springer, 2005).

Activism

Flahive has also been active in the promotion of women in mathematics. She served a five-year term on the Joint Committee On Women In the Mathematical Sciences from 1996 to 2000. With Marie A. Vitulli, she wrote an influential study on patterns of job offers to women with new U.S. Ph.D.s in 1997, and updated the study in 2010. The major differences that both studies found were that, at academic institutions whose highest degree in mathematics is a bachelor's degree, women were initially employed at a substantially higher rate than men, and in business and industry men were initially employed at a considerably higher rate than women. Their study found small differences in hiring at doctorate-granting institutions between men and women, indicating that other points in the career are more critical in explaining the gender gap between men and women in mathematics.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Flahive, Mary E. 1948 births Living people 20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians American women mathematicians St. Joseph's University (New York) alumni Ohio State University alumni Oregon State University faculty 20th-century women mathematicians 21st-century women mathematicians 20th-century American women 21st-century American women