Joan Birman has made contributions to the study of knots, 3-manifolds, mapping class groups of surfaces, geometric group theory, contact structures and dynamical systems.
22 Facts About Joan Birman
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Joan Birman's parents were George and Lillian Lyttle, both Jewish immigrants.
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Joan Birman's father was from Russia but grew up in Liverpool, England.
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Joan Birman's mother was born in New York and her parents were Russian-Polish immigrants.
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Joan Birman appreciated the opportunities from having a business but he wanted his daughters to focus on education.
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Joan Birman has three children, Kenneth P Birman, Deborah Birman Shlider, and Carl David Birman.
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Joan Birman's late husband, Joseph Birman, was a physicist and a leading advocate for human rights for scientists.
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Joan Birman's dissertation was titled Braid groups and their relationship to mapping class groups.
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Joan Birman later worked from the Technical Research Group and the W L Maxson Corporation.
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Joan Birman was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in the summer of 1988.
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Joan Birman supervised 21 doctoral students, and has a total of 70 academic descendants.
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Joan Birman was a founding editor of the journals Geometry and Topology and Algebraic and Geometric Topology.
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Joan Birman was a co-founder of Mathematical Sciences Publishing, a non-profit publishing house.
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Joan Birman was a member of the New York Academy of Sciences Human Rights of Scientists Committee.
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Joan Birman is the author of the research monograph Braids, Links, and Mapping Class Groups.
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In 1974, Birman was selected as a Sloan Research Fellow by the Alfred P Sloan Foundation.
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In 1997, Joan Birman received an honorary doctorate from the Technion Israel Institute of Technology.
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In 2003, Joan Birman was elected to the European Academy of Sciences.
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In 2012, Joan Birman was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences In 2015, Joan Birman was named an honorary member of the London Mathematical Society.
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In 2021, Joan Birman was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
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From 1978 to 1980, and again from 1990 to 1992, Joan Birman was an American Mathematical Society Council member at large.
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In 1990, Joan Birman donated funds to the AMS to establish the Ruth Lyttle Satter Prize in Mathematics in honor of her sister, Ruth Lyttle Satter, who was a plant physiologist.