Dr. Susanne Brenner, the Michael F. and Roberta Nesbit McDonald Professor of Mathematics at LSU, has been selected to give the 2011 Sonia Kovalevsky Lecture. The Sonia Kovalevsky Lecture, presented annually since 2003, was established by the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) to highlight significant contributions of women to applied or computational mathematics. This lecture is given each year at the SIAM Annual Meeting, but this year, it will be presented at the 7th International Congress on Industrial and Applied Mathematics - ICIAM 2011, in Vancouver, British Columbia on July 18, 2011.
Sonia Kovalevsky (1850-1891) received her Doctor of Philosophy degree summa cum laude from the University of Göttingen in 1874, the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in mathematics. In 1888, she was awarded the prestigious Prix Bordin from the French Academie des Sciences for one of her research papers. She is widely recognized for her groundbreaking work in analysis, differential equations, and mechanics.