Catherine Cavagnaro
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Catherine Elizabeth Cavagnaro (born 1965)[1] is an American mathematician and aviator. She is a professor of mathematics at Sewanee: The University of the South, specializing in geometric topology and combinatorial group theory,[2] and is co-editor of the Dictionary of Classical and Theoretical Mathematics.[3] She is also a former record-holder in consecutive spins of an airplane, has been repeatedly recognized by the General Aviation Awards Program for her contributions to flight safety and instruction, and is listed in the Tennessee Aviation Hall of Fame.[4][5]
Cavagnaro was one of three daughters of Louis Cavagnaro (1927–2014), a descendant of Italian immigrants who grew up in the Yosemite Valley and became a builder of dish antennae including the Stanford Dish. Her mother, Catherine Mary Kickham, was originally from Kilkenny, Ireland; her parents settled in California's Santa Clara Valley and later founded a Celtic goods store there.[6]
Education and academic career
Cavagnaro graduated from Santa Clara University in 1987, and completed her PhD at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1995.[4] Her doctoral dissertation, A Homotopy Reciprocity Law for Ribbon Disc Complements, concerned homotopy in low-dimensional topology, and was supervised by Robert F. Craggs.[7] In it, she credits Paul Halmos for, as she puts it, ordering her to go to graduate school.[8]
Meanwhile, she joined the mathematics faculty of Sewanee: The University of the South in 1993.[9] She has served as chair of the mathematics department at Sewanee, and introduced mathematics courses relating to her aviation interests, on topics including aerodynamics and the use of differential equations to model physical phenomena.[4]
In 2001, Cavagnaro and William T. Haight II co-edited the Dictionary of Classical and Theoretical Mathematics, published by the CRC Press as the third volume of their Comprehensive Dictionary of Mathematics book series.[3]
