Sylvia Wiegand

Biography

She was born in Cape Town, South Africa. Her family moved to Wisconsin in 1949, and she graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1966 after three years of study. In 1971 Wiegand earned her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her dissertation was titled Galois Theory of Essential Expansions of Modules and Vanishing Tensor Powers.

In 1987 she became a full professor at the University of Nebraska; at the time Wiegand was the only female professor in the math department. In 1988 Sylvia headed a search committee for two new jobs in the math department, for which two women were hired, although one stayed only a year and another left after four years. In 1996 Sylvia and her husband Roger established a fellowship for graduate student research at the university in honor of Sylvia's grandparents, called the Grace Chisholm Young and William Henry Young Award. Grace Chisholm Young was the first woman to earn a PhD in any discipline from a German university; hers was in mathematics, and her thesis was titled "Algebraisch-gruppentheoretische Untersuchungen zur sphärischen Trigonometrie" (Algebraic Groups of Spherical Trigonometry.)

From 1997 until 2000, Wiegand was President of the Association for Women in Mathematics.

Wiegand has published over forty research papers, including seven joint papers with her husband, and supervised five Ph.D. students.

Recognition

Wiegand is featured in the book Notable Women in Mathematics: A Biographical Dictionary, edited by Charlene Morrow and Teri Perl, published in 1998. For her work in improving the status of women in mathematics, she was awarded the University of Nebraska's Outstanding Contribution to the Status of Women Award in 2000. In May 2005, the University of Nebraska hosted the Nebraska Commutative Algebra Conference: WiegandFest "in celebration of the many important contributions of Sylvia and her husband Roger Wiegand."

In 2012 she became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.