Joan Hutchinson facts for kids

Joan Prince Hutchinson (born in 1945) is an American mathematician. She is a retired professor from Macalester College who is still highly respected for her work in mathematics.

Early Life and Education

Joan Hutchinson was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her father studied how populations change, and her mother was a math teacher. Joan went to the same school her mother taught at, called the Baldwin School.

She later studied at Smith College in Massachusetts. In 1967, she graduated with top honors. Her special project was guided by Professor Alice Dickinson.

After college, Joan worked as a computer programmer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and at Harvard University. She then studied math at the University of Warwick in England. While there, she also learned about "English change ringing" on tower bells, which is a special way of ringing church bells.

When she returned to the United States, she continued her studies at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1973, she earned her highest degree in math, a Ph.D., with help from Professor Herbert S. Wilf.

Career in Mathematics

From 1973 to 1975, Joan Hutchinson held a special teaching and research position at Dartmouth College.

She and her husband, Stan Wagon, who is also a mathematician, taught together for many years. They taught at Smith College from 1975 to 1990. Then, they moved to Macalester College, where they taught from 1990 to 2007. At both colleges, they shared one full-time teaching job.

Professor Hutchinson also took breaks from her main teaching roles to teach and visit other universities. She worked at places like Tufts University, University of Colorado Boulder, and the University of Michigan.

She has been part of many important math groups, such as the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Association of America (MAA). She has been involved with the Association for Women in Mathematics since it started in 1971. A big part of her career has been helping and guiding women students and younger math teachers.

She also helped edit important math magazines. She was on the board of the American Mathematical Monthly for ten years. Since 1993, she has been on the board of the Journal of Graph Theory.

Research and Discoveries

Professor Hutchinson's research mainly focuses on graph theory and discrete mathematics. These are areas of math that study networks and how things connect. She looked at how graphs can be drawn on surfaces and how to color them.

She has written over 75 research papers. Many of these were with Michael O. Albertson, a professor from Smith College.

In one of their most famous works, Albertson and Hutchinson helped solve a problem related to the Heawood conjecture. This problem is about how many colors you need to color a map on different surfaces. They showed that for most surfaces, only certain simple shapes (called complete graphs) can reach the maximum number of colors.

She also worked on how to solve these math problems using computers. For example, she helped make a rule for dividing complex networks on surfaces into smaller parts. With her husband, Stan Wagon, she also wrote papers about how computers can help with the four color theorem. This theorem says you only need four colors to color any map so that no two neighboring regions have the same color.

Albertson and Hutchinson also wrote a textbook together called Discrete Mathematics with Algorithms. This book teaches students about discrete mathematics and how to use computer steps (algorithms) to solve problems.

Awards and Recognition

Professor Hutchinson has received several important awards for her work:

• In 1994, she won the Carl B. Allendoerfer Award from the Mathematical Association of America. She received this for an article she wrote about the "Earth–Moon problem" in Mathematics Magazine. This article was also featured in other science publications.
• In 1998, she won the MAA North Central Section Teaching Award.
• In 1999, she received the Deborah and Franklin Haimo Awards for Distinguished College or University Teaching of Mathematics. This award recognizes excellent college math teachers.

To celebrate her 60th birthday, a special conference called "Graph Theory with Altitude" was held in her honor. It was organized by one of her former students, Ellen Gethner.