Karma Dajani facts for kids

Karma Dajani is a mathematician from Lebanon and the Netherlands. She studies different areas of mathematics, including ergodic theory (which looks at how systems change over time) and probability theory (the study of chance). She also explores how these ideas can be used in number theory, which is about the properties of numbers. Karma Dajani is a professor of mathematics at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

Her Journey in Mathematics

Karma Dajani was born in Lebanon. She started her university studies at the American University of Beirut. She first planned to study medicine, but after one year, she changed her mind and decided to study mathematics instead.

Later, because of the Lebanese Civil War, Karma and her family moved to the United States. There, she continued her studies and earned her Ph.D. in 1989 from George Washington University. She changed her focus a few times during her Ph.D. studies. She started with a field called functional analysis and then tried graph theory. Finally, she found her passion in ergodic theory.

Her Ph.D. project was about "Simultaneous Recurrence of Weighted Cocycles." Her main advisor was E. Arthur Robinson Jr. While studying at George Washington University, Karma Dajani won the university's Taylor Prize in Mathematics twice. This award recognizes excellent math students.

After finishing her Ph.D., she worked as a researcher at the University of Maryland, College Park and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She then became a professor at the University of Alabama.

Later, she married a Dutch mathematician named Cor Kraaikamp. She moved to the Netherlands and worked at Delft University of Technology. After that, she joined Utrecht University. For 25 years, she was the only female mathematics professor at Utrecht University, which shows her dedication and success in her field.

Writing a Book

Karma Dajani co-wrote a book called Ergodic Theory of Numbers with her husband, Cor Kraaikamp. The book was published in 2002 by the Mathematical Association of America.

The idea for the book came from a special course Karma Dajani taught in 1996. This course was part of a summer program designed to encourage women in mathematics.