Maryanthe Malliaris

Malliaris is the daughter of Anastasios G. (Tassos) Malliaris, an economist at Loyola University Chicago, and Mary E. Malliaris, Professor of Information Systems at Loyola.^[2]

As an undergraduate at Harvard College, Malliaris wrote for the Harvard Crimson,^[3] contributed a biography of Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman to the Encyclopedia of Postmodernism,^[ZB] and worked for a startup called Zaps.^[4]

She graduated from Harvard in 2001 with a concentration in mathematics,^[4] and earned her PhD in 2009 from the University of California, Berkeley under the supervision of Thomas Scanlon. Her dissertation was Persistence and Regularity in Unstable Model Theory.^[5]

In her dissertation and postdoctoral research, Malliaris studied unstable model theory and its connection, via characteristic sequences, to graph theoretic concepts such as the Szemerédi regularity lemma.^[6] This work culminated in a proof with Saharon Shelah of the stable regularity lemma, a strengthening of the Szemerédi regularity lemma in the case of stable graphs.^[7]

She is also known for two joint papers with Shelah connecting topology, set theory, and model theory.^[MS13][MS16] In this work, Malliaris and Shelah used Keisler's order, a construction from model theory, to prove the equality between two cardinal characteristics of the continuum, 𝖕 and 𝖙, which are greater than the smallest infinite cardinal and less than or equal to the cardinality of the continuum. This resolved a problem in set theory that had been open for fifty years. Their work also solved another problem, by showing that SOP2 theories are maximal in Keisler's order.^[8][9][10]

Malliaris won a Kurt Gödel Research Prize in 2010 for her work in unstable model theory.^[11]

In 2017, she and Saharon Shelah shared the Hausdorff Medal of the European Set Theory Society for their joint papers.^[9]

She was an invited speaker at the 2018 International Congress of Mathematicians.^[12] She received the Quantrell Award.^[13]