Quick Facts
Biography
Gillian Thornley is a retired New Zealand mathematician.
Gillian Thornley was born in 1940 in Murchison, New Zealand. Living on the family dairy farm, she won a scholarship to board at Nelson College for Girls and in 1958 enrolled at Canterbury University where she graduated with a masters with first class honours in mathematics in 1963. At Canterbury she was a contemporary of Beatrice Tinsley.
Academic career
Gillian Thornley received her PhD in metric differential geometry from the University of Toronto in 1963. She returned first to Canterbury then took up a two-year lectureship in Trinidad at the University of The West Indies. She then moved back to New Zealand (Nelson and Wellington), combining part-time positions in both academia and the public service (where she worked on economic modelling) with caring for her two young children. She joined the mathematics institute at Massey University, Palmerston North, remaining there from 1980 to her retirement in 2006. In 1989 she was elected first woman President of the New Zealand Mathematical Society. Gillian Thornley presented at the 1990 Conference of the International Mathematics Organisation on the experience of women mathematicians in academia. She also co-authored an article in 2001 on the experience of mathematics doctoral students in New Zealand.