Kathy Horadam facts for kids
Kathryn Jennifer Horadam (born in 1951) is an Australian mathematician. She is famous for her work on special math problems called Hadamard matrices and other areas in mathematics, including information security (which is about keeping digital information safe). She used to be a professor at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) and is now an Emeritus Professor there, meaning she has retired but still holds an honored position.
About Her Life
Kathryn Horadam was born in 1951 in Armidale, New South Wales. Her parents, Alwyn Horadam and Eleanor Mollie Horadam, were also mathematicians!
She loved math and studied it at the Australian National University. She earned her first degree in 1972 and then completed her PhD in 1977. Her PhD project was about something called The Homology of Groupnets.
Kathryn worked at RMIT for more than 30 years. She became a full professor of mathematics there in 1995. She also spent three years working for the Defence Science and Technology Group, which helps keep Australia safe through science and technology.
Her Book
Kathryn Horadam wrote an important book called Hadamard Matrices and Their Applications. It was published in 2007 by Princeton University Press. This book helps explain her special math work to others.
Awards and Recognition
Kathryn Horadam has received several honors for her work.
- In 1991, she became a fellow of the Institute of Combinatorics and its Applications.
- In 2001, she became a fellow of the Australian Mathematical Society.
To celebrate her 60th birthday, a special international workshop about Hadamard matrices was held at RMIT in 2011. Many mathematicians came to share their ideas. The papers from this workshop were later published in 2013 in a special issue of the Australasian Journal of Combinatorics. This showed how much her work is valued by other mathematicians around the world.
