Silvia Heubach is a German-American mathematician specializing in

enumerative combinatorics Enumerative combinatorics is an area of combinatorics that deals with the number of ways that certain patterns can be formed. Two examples of this type of problem are counting combinations and counting permutations. More generally, given an infin ...

, combinatorial game theory, and

bioinformatics Bioinformatics () is an interdisciplinary field that develops methods and software tools for understanding biological data, in particular when the data sets are large and complex. As an interdisciplinary field of science, bioinformatics combin ...

. She is a professor of mathematics at

California State University, Los Angeles California State University, Los Angeles (Cal State LA) is a public university in Los Angeles, California. It is part of the 23-campus California State University (CSU) system. Cal State LA offers 142 bachelor's degrees, 122 master's degrees, ...

Education and career

Heubach earned bachelor's and master's degrees in mathematics and economics from the

University of Ulm Ulm University (german: Universität Ulm) is a public university in Ulm, Baden-Württemberg, Germany. The university was founded in 1967 and focuses on natural sciences, medicine, engineering sciences, mathematics, economics and computer sci ...

in 1983 and 1986, respectively. Through a program at the University of Ulm, she came to the

University of Southern California , mottoeng = "Let whoever earns the palm bear it" , religious_affiliation = Nonsectarian—historically Methodist , established = , accreditation = WSCUC , type = Private research university , academic_affiliations = , endowment = $8. ...

(USC) for a one-year exchange, but decided to stay on for a Ph.D. program. She completed a master's degree in mathematics in 1988 and a Ph.D. in applied mathematics at USC in 1992. Her dissertation, ''A Stochastic Model for the Movement of a White Blood Cell'', was supervised by Joseph C. Watkins.. After completing her doctorate, Heubach held visiting faculty positions at

Colorado College Colorado College is a private college, private Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college in Colorado Springs, Colorado. It was founded in 1874 by Thomas Nelson Haskell in his daughter's memory. The college enrolls approxi ...

and

Humboldt State University California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt also known as Cal Poly Humboldt, Humboldt or Cal Poly"Cal Poly" may also refer to California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, California or California State Polytechnic Universi ...

before joining the faculty at California State University, Los Angeles in 1994.

Contributions

Heubach is the co-author of the book ''Combinatorics of Compositions and Words'' (with

Toufik Mansour Toufik Mansour is an Israeli mathematician working in algebraic combinatorics. He is a member of the Druze community and is the first Israeli Druze to become a professional mathematician. Mansour obtained his Ph.D. in mathematics from the Unive ...

, CRC Press, 2009). She is a contributor to a text in bioinformatics, "Concepts in Bioinformatics and Genomics" by Jamil Momand and Alison McCurdy, Oxford University Press, 2016. Her research in combinatorial game theory has also included analysis of a variant of

nim Nim is a mathematical two player game. Nim or NIM may also refer to: * Nim (programming language) * Nim Chimpsky, a signing chimpanzee Acronyms * Network Installation Manager, an IBM framework * Nuclear Instrumentation Module * Negative index met ...

in which piles of pebbles are placed on the edges of a

tetrahedron In geometry, a tetrahedron (plural: tetrahedra or tetrahedrons), also known as a triangular pyramid, is a polyhedron composed of four triangular faces, six straight edges, and four vertex corners. The tetrahedron is the simplest of all the ...

and each move removes at least one pebble from the set of edges incident to a single triangle of the tetrahedron.

Recognition

In 2018, Heubach won the California State University system's Faculty Innovation and Leadership Award, becoming the first professor at the Los Angeles campus of the system to be so honored. The award honored her educational initiatives including developing a new sequence of mathematics courses for life sciences students, developing flipped classroom mathematics courses, and improving statistics courses used to fulfill general education requirements.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Heubach, Silvia Year of birth missing (living people) Living people 20th-century German mathematicians German women mathematicians 20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians American women mathematicians Combinatorialists University of Ulm alumni University of Southern California alumni Colorado College faculty Humboldt State University faculty California State University, Los Angeles faculty 20th-century American women 21st-century American women 20th-century German women