Quick Facts
Biography
Melanie Matchett Wood (born 1981) is an American mathematician at University of California, Berkeley who became the first female American to make the U.S. International Mathematical Olympiad Team. She completed her Ph.D. in 2009 at Princeton University (under Manjul Bhargava) and is currently Chancellor's Professor of Mathematics at UC Berkeley, after being Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Mathematics at the University of Wisconsin and spending 2 years as Szegö Assistant Professor at Stanford University.
Wood was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, to Sherry Eggers and Archie Wood, both middle school teachers. Her father, a mathematics teacher, died of cancer when Wood was six weeks old.
While a high school student at Park Tudor School in Indianapolis, Wood (then aged 16) became the first, and until 2004 the only female American to make the U.S. International Mathematical Olympiad Team, receiving silver medals in the 1998 and 1999 International Mathematical Olympiad. Wood was also a cheerleader and student newspaper editor at her school.
In 2002, she received the Alice T. Schafer Prize from the Association for Women in Mathematics.
In 2003, Wood graduated from Duke University where she won a Gates Cambridge Scholarship, Fulbright fellowship, and a National Science Foundation graduate fellowship, in addition to becoming the first American woman and second woman overall to be named a Putnam Fellow in 2002. During the 2003–2004 year she studied at Cambridge University. She was also named the Deputy Leader of the U.S. team that finished second overall at the 2005 International Mathematical Olympiad.
In 2004, she won the Morgan Prize for work in two topics, Belyi-extending maps and P-orderings, making her the first woman to win this award.
In 2012, she became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
In 2017, she received an NSF Career Award.
In 2018, she received the AWM-Microsoft Research Prize in Algebra and Number Theory from the Association for Women in Mathematics.
Selected publications
- Wood, Melanie (2019). "Nonabelian Cohen-Lenstra moments. With an appendix by the author and Philip Matchett Wood". Duke Math. J. 168, no. 3, 377–427. MR 3909900.
- Vakil, Ravi; Wood, Melanie (2015). "Discriminants in the Grothendieck ring". Duke Math. J. 164,no. 6, 1139–1185. MR 3336842.
- Wood, Melanie (2011). "Gauss composition over an arbitrary base". Adv. Math. 226, no. 2, 1756–1771. MR 2737799.
- Wood, Melanie (2010). "On the probabilities of local behaviors in abelian field extensions". Compos. Math. 146, no. 1, 102–128. MR 2581243
- Wood, Melanie (2003). "P-orderings: a metric viewpoint and the non-existence of simultaneous orderings". Journal of Number Theory. 99 (1): 36–56. doi:10.1016/S0022-314X(02)00056-2. MR 1957243.
