Marian Pour-El facts for kids

Marian Boykan Pour-El (born April 29, 1928 – died June 10, 2009) was an American mathematician. She was known for her important new ideas in a field called computable analysis, which connects math with computers.

Early Life and School Years

Marian Boykan was born in 1928 in New York City. Her father, Joseph Boykan, was a dentist, and her mother, Matilda, was a former lab technician.

As a child, Marian loved ballet and performed at the famous Metropolitan Opera House. This experience helped her feel comfortable speaking in front of large groups later in life.

She wanted to go to the Bronx High School of Science, but at that time, it was only for boys. So, she attended a girls' school called Hunter College High School instead.

College and University Studies

Marian's parents could not afford to pay for a private college. So, she went to Hunter College, which was a local and affordable school. She earned a bachelor's degree in physics in 1949. She also took many math classes, enough for a second major, but the school rules did not allow two majors.

She was accepted into Harvard University for graduate studies in mathematics. She was the only woman in the program and received full financial support. At Harvard, she earned her master's degree in 1951 and her Ph.D. in mathematical logic in 1958.

Her time at Harvard was often lonely. Few students wanted to sit next to her in class. Also, the closest restroom for women was in a different building. Even when she taught a class in a building with air conditioning, she was not allowed in because it was off-limits to women. Because there were no logic experts at Harvard then, she spent five years as a visiting student at the University of California, Berkeley. Her Ph.D. paper was titled Computable Functions.

Career in Mathematics

After finishing her Ph.D., Pour-El joined the math department at Pennsylvania State University. She earned a permanent position there in 1962. From 1962 to 1964, she took a break to work with the famous mathematician Kurt Gödel at the Institute for Advanced Study.

In 1964, she moved to the University of Minnesota. She became a full professor there in 1968. She stayed at the University of Minnesota until she retired in 2000, except for one year (1969-1970) when she was a visiting professor at the University of Bristol.

At Minnesota, one of her students who earned a Ph.D. was Jill Zimmerman. Jill later became a professor of mathematics and computer science at Goucher College.

Important Contributions to Math

Pour-El's early work focused on recursion theory, which is about what can be computed. She worked with other well-known mathematicians like William Alvin Howard, Saul Kripke, Donald A. Martin, and Hilary Putnam.

In 1974, she studied how analog computers could solve problems. She showed that the functions these computers could solve were the same as those that define solutions to algebraic differential equations. This important finding became known as the Shannon–Pour-El thesis.

Computable Analysis and Surprising Results

In the late 1970s, Pour-El began working on computable analysis. Her "most famous and surprising result" came from her work with her colleague J. Ian Richards. They found that for some simple starting conditions, it was impossible to predict the exact behavior of the wave equation using standard computations. This is called an undecidable problem.

Their discovery was mentioned by Roger Penrose in his book The Emperor's New Mind. Penrose used their result to test the Church-Turing thesis, which is about what computers can do. However, he noted that the complex nature of the starting conditions made it unlikely that a computer could use this to go beyond normal computing limits. Freeman Dyson also used this result to discuss how analog forms of life might be better than digital ones.

Pour-El and Richards also wrote a book together called Computability in Analysis and Physics.

Awards and Recognition

Marian Pour-El was recognized for her achievements.

• In 1975, she was elected to the Hunter College Hall of Fame.
• In 1983, she became a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
• In 1993, a special meeting was held in Japan to honor her work.

Personal Life

While studying at Berkeley, Marian met her husband, Akiva Pour-El, who was a biochemist from Israel. They had one daughter named Ina. Akiva followed Marian to Penn State after he finished his own doctorate. He later moved with her again when she went to Minnesota.

They sometimes lived apart for long periods, especially from 1969 to 1975 when her husband taught in Illinois. Marian even wrote an article in 1981 about how she made a long-distance relationship work.

Marian Pour-El's brother is the music composer Martin Boykan.