Michelle Lynn Wachs is an American mathematician who specializes in algebraic combinatorics and works as a professor of mathematics at the University of Miami.[1]
Contributions
Wachs and her advisor Adriano Garsia are the namesakes of the Garsia–Wachs algorithm for optimal binary search trees, which they published in 1977.[2][A]She is also known for her research on shellings for simplicial complexes,[F] partially ordered sets,[C] and Coxeter groups,[B] and on random permutation statistics[E] and set partition statistics.[D]
Education
Wachs earned her doctorate in 1977 from the University of California, San Diego, under the supervision of Adriano Garsia. Her dissertation was Discrete Variational Techniques in Finite Mathematics.[3]
Recognition
In 2012 Wachs became one of the inaugural fellows of the American Mathematical Society.[4] In 2013 she and her husband, mathematician Gregory Galloway (the chair of the mathematics department at Miami) were recognized as Simons Fellows.[5] A conference in her honor was held in January 2015 at the University of Miami.[6]