Ioana Dumitriu
Ioana Dumitriu became interested in mathematical problem solving in middle school, back in her native town of Bucharest, Romania. She fell in love with puzzles, games, and mathematical tricks, participated in mathematical contests and Olympiads, and by the time high-school came around, she had chosen to make math her career. Professor Dumitriu obtained her BA in math from New York University in 1999 and her PhD from MIT in 2003. After spending three great years at UC Berkeley and thirteen wonderful ones at UW, she became a Professor of Mathematics at University of California, San Diego in 2019.
Along the way, she has taught problem-solving seminars and combinatorics classes, and she has lectured at the Bay Area Mathematical Circle and at the San Jose Mathematical Circle, as well as at MathDay (the annual one-day MathFest held during Spring Break at UW). Professor Dumitriu's work is at the interface between Numerical Analysis and Random Matrix Theory. She employs a variety of tools coming from statistics and probability, as well as linear algebra and combinatorics, to the theoretical study of random matrix problems arising in fields as varied as quantum physics, statistical mechanics, numerical analysis, and finance.