Cindy Greenwood facts for kids

Priscilla E. (Cindy) Greenwood is a Canadian mathematician. She is a retired professor of mathematics at the University of British Columbia. She is well-known for her important work in probability theory, which is a branch of math that studies chance and randomness.

Cindy Greenwood's Journey in Math

Cindy Greenwood started her university studies at Duke University. She earned her first degree in 1959. She then began her advanced studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There, she discovered probability theory through a course on stochastic processes. These are mathematical models for things that change randomly over time.

Soon after, she moved to the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She completed her Ph.D. in 1963. After teaching for two years at North Carolina College, she joined the University of British Columbia in 1966. She also spent time at Arizona State University as a visiting professor and later as a research professor.

What Cindy Greenwood Studied

Understanding Randomness

In the 1970s, Cindy Greenwood's research focused on how things move randomly. She studied Brownian motion, which describes the random movement of particles. She also looked at Lévy processes, another way to model random jumps. During this time, she developed a new mathematical idea called the "martintote." This is similar to a martingale, which helps scientists understand how random processes behave over a long time.

Exploring Deeper Math

In the 1980s, Greenwood started working with Ed Perkins. They used a special math method called nonstandard analysis. This helped them study tiny details of random movements, like local time and excursions. She also began to study "set-indexed processes," which led her to random fields. These are mathematical models for data that changes across space or time. She also worked on semimartingales, another type of random process.

She traveled to Russia and wrote a book about chi-squared tests with Mikhail Nikulin. These tests are used to see if data fits a certain pattern.

Math for Real-World Problems

In 1990, she wrote another book with Igor Evstigneev about random fields. Her research also looked at how efficient statistical methods are. She started working in biostatistics, which uses math to understand living things. For example, she studied different animal populations. She also led a big study on how to make good guesses about numbers when they are close to a special "critical point."

Starting in 2000, at Arizona State, she studied pink noise and stochastic resonance. Pink noise is a type of random signal, like certain sounds. Stochastic resonance is when a small amount of random noise can actually help a system work better. She used these ideas to understand how diseases spread in epidemic models. She also applied them to how brain cells, called neurons, send signals.

Awards and Honours

Cindy Greenwood has received important recognition for her work.

• In 1985, she was chosen as a fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.
• In 2002, she won the Krieger–Nelson Prize from the Canadian Mathematical Society. This award celebrates outstanding women in mathematics.

Books

• Contiguity and the statistical invariance principle (with A. N. Shiryayev, Gordon & Breach, 1985)
• Markov fields over countable partially ordered sets: extrema and splitting (with I. V. Evstigneev, Memoirs of the American Mathematical Society 112, American Mathematical Society, 1994)
• A guide to chi-squared testing (with Mikhail S. Nikulin, Wiley, 1996)
• Stochastic neuron models (with Lawrence M. Ward, Mathematical Biosciences Institute Lecture Series, Springer, 2016)

See also

In Spanish: Cindy Greenwood para niños