Eleanor Gilbert Rieffel (born 1965) is a

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, mathematical structure, structure, space, Mathematica ...

interested in

quantum computing A quantum computer is a computer that exploits quantum mechanical phenomena. On small scales, physical matter exhibits properties of wave-particle duality, both particles and waves, and quantum computing takes advantage of this behavior using s ...

computer vision Computer vision tasks include methods for image sensor, acquiring, Image processing, processing, Image analysis, analyzing, and understanding digital images, and extraction of high-dimensional data from the real world in order to produce numerical ...

, and

cryptography Cryptography, or cryptology (from "hidden, secret"; and ''graphein'', "to write", or ''-logy, -logia'', "study", respectively), is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of Adversary (cryptography), ...

. She is a senior research scientist at

NASA The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agencies of the United States government, independent agency of the federal government of the United States, US federal government responsible for the United States ...

Ames Research Center The Ames Research Center (ARC), also known as NASA Ames, is a major NASA research center at Moffett Federal Airfield in California's Silicon Valley. It was founded in 1939 as the second National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) laborat ...

. Rieffel earned her Ph.D. in 1993 from the

University of California, Los Angeles The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California, United States. Its academic roots were established in 1881 as a normal school the ...

. Her dissertation, ''Groups Coarse Quasi-Isometric to the Hyperbolic Plane Cross the Real Line'', concerned

geometric group theory Geometric group theory is an area in mathematics devoted to the study of finitely generated groups via exploring the connections between algebraic properties of such groups and topological and geometric properties of spaces on which these group ...

, and was supervised by Geoffrey Mess. After working for FX Palo Alto Laboratory, she joined NASA in 2012. In 2019 she won the

NASA Exceptional Engineering Achievement Medal The NASA Exceptional Engineering Achievement Medal (abbreviated EEAM) was established by NASA in 1981 to recognize unusually significant engineering contributions towards achievement of aeronautical or space exploration goals. This award is given ...

. With Wolfgang Polak, Rieffel is the author of the book '' Quantum Computing: A Gentle Introduction'' (MIT Press, 2011).

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* 1965 births Living people 20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians University of California, Los Angeles alumni NASA people 20th-century American women mathematicians 21st-century American women mathematicians {{US-mathematician-stub