Yael Dowker


Yael Naim Dowker was an English mathematician, prominent especially due to her work in the fields of measure theory, ergodic theory and topological dynamics.

Biography

Yael Naim was born in Tel Aviv. She left for the United States to study at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. In 1941, as a graduate student, she met Clifford Hugh Dowker, a Canadian topologist working as an instructor there. The couple married in 1944. From 1943 to 1946 they worked together at the Radiation Laboratory at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Clifford also worked as a civilian adviser for the United States Air Force during World War II.
Dowker did her doctorate at Radcliffe College under Witold Hurewicz. She published her thesis Invariant measure and the ergodic theorems in 1947 and received her Ph.D in 1948.
In the period between 1948 and 1949, she did post-doctoral work at the Institute for Advanced Study, located in Princeton, New Jersey. A few years after the war, McCarthyism became a common phenomenon in the academic world, with several of the Dowker couple's friends in the mathematical community harassed and one arrested. In 1950, they emigrated to the United Kingdom.
In 1951 Dowker served as a professor at the University of Manchester, and later went on as a professor at the Imperial College London, where she was the first female reader within the department.
While there, among the students she advised was Bill Parry, who published his thesis in 1960. She also cooperated on some of her work with the Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős. She worked with her husband with gifted children who were having difficulties at school for the National association for gifted children.

Legacy

The best PhD award at Imperial College London is given in her name each year.

Works