Joan Hutchinson

Joan Prince Hutchinson (born 1945) is an American mathematician and Professor Emerita of Mathematics from Macalester College.^[1][2]

Education

Joan Hutchinson was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; her father was a demographer and university professor, and her mother a high school mathematics teacher.^[1] She studied at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, graduating in 1967 summa cum laude with an honors paper directed by Prof. Alice Dickinson.^[1] After graduation she worked as a computer programmer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and at the Harvard University Computing Center then studied mathematics (and English change ringing on tower bells) at the University of Warwick in Coventry England.^[1] Returning to the United States, Hutchinson did graduate work at the University of Pennsylvania earning a Ph.D. in mathematics in 1973 under the supervision of Herbert S. Wilf.^[3]

Career

She was a John Wesley Young research instructor at Dartmouth College, 1973–1975. She and her husband, fellow mathematician Stan Wagon, taught at Smith College, 1975-1990, and at Macalester College, 1990-2007. At both colleges they shared a full-time position in mathematics. She spent sabbaticals, taught, and held visiting positions at Tufts University, Carleton College, University of Colorado Boulder, University of Washington, University of Michigan, Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, California, and University of Colorado Denver.^[2] Her research has focused on graph theory and discrete mathematics, specializing mainly in topological and chromatic graph theory and on visibility graphs;^[2] for overviews of this work see the first two listed publications.^{[pub 1] [pub 2]} She has also considered algorithmic aspects in these areas, for example, generalizing the planar separator theorem to surfaces.^{[pub 3]} She has published over 75 research and expository papers in graph theory, many with the late Michael O. Albertson,^[4] formerly of Smith College. In one of their most cited works, Albertson and Hutchinson completed work of a Danish mathematician.^{[pub 4]} They also wrote together the text Discrete Mathematics with Algorithms.^{[1][5][pub 5]} With S. Wagon she has co-authored papers on algorithmic aspects of the Four Color Theorem.^{[pub 6]}

She has served on committees of the American Mathematical Society, the Mathematical Association of America (MAA), SIAM Special Interest Group on Discrete Math (SIAM-DM), and the Association for Women in Mathematics, involved with the latter organization since a graduate student during its founding days in 1971. Mentoring women students and younger colleagues has been an important concern of her professional life. She served as the vice-chair of SIAM-DM, 2000-2002. She was a member of the editorial board of the American Mathematical Monthly, 1986-1996, and continues on the board of the Journal of Graph Theory^[6] since 1993.

Awards and honors

In 1994 she received the Carl B. Allendoerfer Award^[7] of the Mathematical Association of America for the expository article Coloring ordinary maps, maps of empires, and maps of the moon ^{[pub 7]} in Mathematics Magazine. The work of this paper was also included in an issue of What’s Happening in the Mathematical Sciences^[8] and in the Mathematical Recreations column^[9][10] of Scientific American.

In 1998 she was a winner of the MAA North Central Section Teaching Award,^[11] and in 1999 she was a winner of the Deborah and Franklin Tepper Haimo Award for Excellence in College or University Teaching.^[12] On the occasion of her 60th birthday, she was the honoree at the Graph Theory with Altitude conference^[13] at the University of Colorado Denver, organized by her former student Ellen Gethner, professor of computer science.

Selected publications

1. ↑ Hutchinson, Joan P. (2009). "C6: Topics in Topological Graph Theory". In Beineke, L. W.; Wilson, R.J. Colouring graphs on surfaces. Encyclopedia of Mathematics and Its Applications. 128. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 111–132. MR 2581543. 
2. ↑ Dean, Alice M.; Hutchinson, Joan P. (2014). "Section 10.7 Visibility Graphs". In Gross, J. L.; Yellen, J.; Zhang, J. Handbook of Graph Theory (2nd ed.). Boca Raton: CRC Press. ISBN 9781439880180. 
3. ↑ Gilbert, John R.; Hutchinson, Joan P.; Tarjan, Robert Endre (1984), "A separator theorem for graphs of bounded genus", Journal of Algorithms, 5 (3): 391–407, doi:10.1016/0196-6774(84)90019-1, MR 756165 
4. ↑ Albertson, Michael O.; Hutchinson, Joan P. (1979). "The three excluded cases of Dirac's map-color theorem" [Second International Conference on Combinatorial Mathematics (New York, 1978)]. Ann. New York Acad. of Sci. New York: New York Acad, Sci. 319: 7–17. MR 0556001. 
5. ↑ Albertson, Michael O.; Hutchinson, Joan P. (1988). Discrete Mathematics with Algorithms. New York: Wiley. ISBN 0-471-84902-2. MR 0950858. 
6. ↑ Hutchinson, Joan P.; Wagon, Stanley (1998). "Kempe revisited". Amer. Math. Monthly. Mathematical Association of America. 105: 170–174. 
7. ↑ Hutchinson, Joan P. (1993), "Coloring ordinary maps, maps of empires and maps of the moon", Mathematics Magazine, 66 (4): 211–226, doi:10.2307/2690733, MR 1240669 

References