Irene Sciriha Aquilina is a

Maltese Maltese may refer to: * Someone or something of, from, or related to Malta * Maltese alphabet * Maltese cuisine * Maltese culture * Maltese language, the Semitic language spoken by Maltese people * Maltese people, people from Malta or of Malte ...

mathematician specializing in

spectral graph theory In mathematics, spectral graph theory is the study of the properties of a graph in relationship to the characteristic polynomial, eigenvalues, and eigenvectors of matrices associated with the graph, such as its adjacency matrix or Laplacian matrix ...

and

chemical graph theory Chemical graph theory is the topology branch of mathematical chemistry which applies graph theory to mathematical modelling of chemical phenomena. The pioneers of chemical graph theory are Alexandru Balaban, Ante Graovac, Iván Gutman, Haruo Hosoy ...

. A particular topic of her research has been the singular graphs, graphs whose

adjacency matrix In graph theory and computer science, an adjacency matrix is a square matrix used to represent a finite graph. The elements of the matrix indicate whether pairs of vertices are adjacent or not in the graph. In the special case of a finite simp ...

is a singular matrix, and the nut graphs, singular graphs all of whose nontrivial induced subgraphs are non-singular. She is a professor of mathematics at the

University of Malta The University of Malta (, UM, formerly UOM) is a higher education institution in Malta. It offers undergraduate bachelor's degrees, postgraduate master's degrees and postgraduate doctorates. It is a member of the European University Association ...

Education and career

Sciriha studied mathematics at the University of Malta, earning bachelor's and master's degrees as the only woman studying mathematics or physics there at that time. She completed a PhD in 1998 at the University of Reading in England. Her dissertation, ''On some aspects of graph spectra'', was jointly supervised by

Anthony Hilton Anthony J. W. Hilton (born 4 April 1941) is a British mathematician specializing in combinatorics and graph theory. His current positions are as emeritus professor of Combinatorial Mathematics at the University of Reading and professorial research ...

and Stanley Fiorini. She began teaching at the University of Malta in 1971. She was convenor of

European Women in Mathematics European Women in Mathematics (EWM) is an international association of women working in the field of mathematics in Europe. The association participates in political and strategic work to promote the role of women in mathematics and offers its mem ...

from 2000 to 2001.

Recognition

Sciriha is a Fellow of the Institute of Combinatorics and its Applications. One of her students, chemist Martha Borg, won the Turner Prize at the

University of Sheffield , mottoeng = To discover the causes of things , established = – University of SheffieldPredecessor institutions: – Sheffield Medical School – Firth College – Sheffield Technical School – University College of Sheffield , type = Pu ...

for a doctoral dissertation co-advised by Sciriha and Patrick W. Fowler.

References

External links

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Sciriha, Irene Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Maltese mathematicians 20th-century mathematicians 21st-century mathematicians 21st-century women mathematicians Women mathematicians Graph theorists Alumni of the University of Reading Academic staff of the University of Malta