Marie A. Vitulli

Marie A. Vitulli

November 19, 1949 --

Marie A. Vitulli was born in Mineola, New York in 1949. She entered the University of Rochester in 1967, graduating in 1971 with a B.A. degree in mathematics. During her undergraduate days at Rochester she studied the viola at Eastman School of Music and played with the university symphony orchestra. Marie began graduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania in 1971. She was awarded an N.S.F. Traineeship and a Dissertation Year Fellowship at Penn. In 1976 she received a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation was entitled "Weierstrass points and monomial curves" and was directed by Dock S. Rim.

In 1976 Dr. Vitulli moved to Eugene, Oregon, to begin a long career at the University of Oregon. Her mathematical research is in commutative algebra and its interactions with algebraic geometry. Vitulli did seminal work on seminormal and weakly normal rings and algebraic varieties. Along with her colleague D.K. Harrison, she developed a valuation theory for rings with zero divisors. Prof. Vitulli directed the Ph.D. dissertations of Kenneth Valente, Laurie Burton, and Heather Coughlin at Oregon.

While at Oregon, Dr. Vitulli worked in various ways to improve opportunities for women in mathematics. She was involved in the creation of a scholarship program for undergraduate women in mathematics and the physical sciences. She created and maintains the Women in Math Web Project. The site features an extensive collection of biographies; a categorized and searchable bibliography of publications on gender and mathematics and gender and science; a section on opportunities including information on grants, scholarships, fellowships, and summer intern programs; a section on associations of interest to women in the mathematical sciences; and a section containing miscellaneous links. The site was chosen as a Site of the Day for 4 August 1998 by New Scientist Planet Science and by the Eisenhower National Clearinghouse for Mathematics and Science Education as one of its Digital Dozen sites mathematics.

Professor Vitulli has served on many local, statewide, and national committees including the Center for the Study of Women and Society Executive Committee, the Association of Oregon Faculties (President, 2007 - 2009), the Joint Committee on Women in the Mathematical Sciences, the AMS-ASA-IMS-MAA Annual Data Survey Committee, the Association for Women in Mathematics Executive Committee. She Mary E. Flahive (Oregon State University) conducted studies of first jobs for new Ph.D.s in mathematics with an eye towards gender differences in 1997 and 2010; summaries of these studies appeared in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society. Marie plays the viola in the Riverside Chamber Symphony and Quartetta Oliva.

References

  1. An Update: Are Women Getting All the Jobs?, Notices of the Amer. Math. Society 57 (2010) 984-986. (with Mary E. Flahive)
  2. Are Women Getting All the Jobs?, Notices of the Amer. Math. Society 44 (1997) 338-339. (with Mary E. Flahive)
  3. Weierstrass points and monomial curves, J. of Alg., 48 (1977), 454-476. (with D.S. Rim)
  4. Seminormal rings and weakly normal varieties, Nagoya Math. J., 82 (1981), 27-56. (with J.V. Leahy).
  5. Weak normality and seminormality, invited article for Springer volume Commutative algebra: Noetherian and Non-Noetherian Perspectives, ArXiv number 0906.3334
  6. V-Valuations of a commutative ring I., J. of Alg., 126 (1989), 264-292 (with D.K. Harrison).