Barbara Falkenbach Ryan
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Barbara Falkenbach Ryan is an American mathematician, computer scientist, statistician and business executive. She is known for developing the Minitab statistical software package, and for being president and CEO of Minitab, Inc.
Ryan earned her Ph.D. in mathematics in 1968 at Cornell University, studying recursion theory under the supervision of Anil Nerode. Her dissertation was ω-Cohesive Sets.[1][2] Nerode writes that, although Ryan moved away from this subject "immediately after her degree", Nerode still found her thesis work to be original and worth publishing many years later, and was able to persuade Ryan to publish the work in a journal by threatening to hold back a letter of reference for her.[3]
Soon after completing their doctorates, Ryan and her then-husband, statistician and fellow Cornell graduate Thomas A. Ryan Jr. (1940–2017)[2][3][4] found positions at Pennsylvania State University. She joined the computer science department at Penn State, and published research on a more applied topic, I/O scheduling.[5]
