Cindy Greenwood facts for kids

Priscilla E. (Cindy) Greenwood (born 1937) is a Canadian mathematician. She is a professor at the University of British Columbia, where she is now a professor emeritus. This means she has retired but still holds an honorary title. She is well-known for her important work in probability theory, which is the study of chance and randomness.

Her Journey in Math

Cindy Greenwood earned her first degree, a Bachelor of Arts (B.A.), from Duke University in 1959. She then started her advanced studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Here, she began learning about operations research, which uses math to solve problems in business and engineering.

In 1960, she took a class on stochastic processes. These are mathematical models that describe things that change randomly over time, like stock prices or weather patterns. This class, taught by Henry McKean, sparked her interest in probability theory.

Soon after, she moved to the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She finished her Ph.D. (a high-level research degree) in 1963. Her advisor was Joshua Chover. After teaching for two years at North Carolina College, she joined the University of British Columbia in 1966. She has also worked at Arizona State University as a visiting professor and later as a research professor.

Exploring the World of Probability

Cindy Greenwood's research has explored many exciting areas of mathematics.

Early Research: Random Movements

In the 1970s, she studied things like Brownian motion. This describes the random movement of tiny particles in a fluid. She also looked at Lévy processes, which are another type of random movement. Her work helped develop the "martintote" theory. This is a special mathematical process used to understand how things behave over a long time.

New Ideas and Collaborations

In the 1980s, Greenwood started working with Ed Perkins. They used a method called nonstandard analysis to study "local time" and "excursions." These terms describe how long a random process stays in a certain place or how it moves away from a starting point.

Around this time, she also began studying "set-indexed processes." This led her to the theory of random fields, which are like maps where every point has a random value. She also worked on "semimartingales," another type of random process. She even traveled to Russia and wrote a book about chi-squared tests with Mikhail Nikulin. These tests are used in statistics to see if observed data matches what you expect.

Applying Math to Real Life

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 statistics to solve problems in biology and medicine. For example, she studied different animal populations. She also led a big study on how to make good guesses (estimations) in statistics, especially when things are changing quickly.

After 2000, at Arizona State, she researched "pink noise" and "stochastic resonance." Pink noise is a type of random signal, and stochastic resonance is when a small signal gets stronger with the help of noise. She used these ideas to study how diseases spread (epidemic models) and how brain cells (neurons) send signals.

Awards and Recognition

Cindy Greenwood's important contributions to mathematics have been recognized with several honors:

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

Books She Wrote

• Contiguity and the statistical invariance principle (with A. N. Shiryayev, 1985)
• Markov fields over countable partially ordered sets: extrema and splitting (with I. V. Evstigneev, 1994)
• A guide to chi-squared testing (with Mikhail S. Nikulin, 1996)
• Stochastic neuron models (with Lawrence M. Ward, 2016)

See also

In Spanish: Cindy Greenwood para niños