Rhonda Hughes

Education

Hughes grew up in a working-class family on the south side of Chicago. When she was a pre-teen, her family moved to a better neighborhood, where she became a cheerleader and valedictorian of her class at Gage Park High School. She studied engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign for one and a half years, dropped out to return to her home and work for six months, then resumed her education at the University of Illinois at Chicago on a scholarship studying mathematics. There, she came under the mentorship of Yoram Sagher, who pushed her to continue in graduate studies in mathematics. She earned a Ph.D. from the same university in 1975, under the supervision of Shmuel Kantorovitz, with a dissertation entitled Semi-Groups of Unbounded Linear Operators in Banach Space.

Career

She began her teaching career at Tufts University then spent a year as a fellow at the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College. She moved to Bryn Mawr College in 1980. She is a professor emeritus of mathematics at Bryn Mawr where until her 2011 retirement she was the Helen Hermann Professor of Mathematics.

She was president of the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) 1987-1988. She serves on the Commission on Physical Science, Mathematics, and Applications of the United States National Research Council.

She and Sylvia Bozeman organized the Spelman-Bryn Mawr Summer Mathematics Program for female undergraduate students.

Her recent research work involves wavelet analysis.

Awards

She received a Distinguished Teaching Award from the Mathematical Association of America in 1997. In 2010 she received the Gweneth Humphreys Award for Mentorship of Undergraduate Women in Mathematics of the Association for Women in Mathematics, and in 2013 she received the Elizabeth Bingham Award of the Philadelphia Chapter of the Association for Women in Science.