Joan Hutchinson

Joan Prince Hutchinson (born 1945) is an American mathematician and Professor Emerita of Mathematics from Macalester College.

Joan Hutchinson was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; her father was a demographer and university professor, and her mother a high school mathematics teacher. She studied at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, graduating in 1967 summa cum laude with an honors paper directed by Prof. Alice Dickinson. After graduation she worked as a computer programmer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and at the Harvard University Computing Center then studied mathematics (and English change ringing on tower bells) at the University of Warwick in Coventry England. Returning to the United States, Hutchinson did graduate work at the University of Pennsylvania earning a Ph.D. in mathematics in 1973 under the supervision of Herbert S. Wilf.

She was a John Wesley Young research instructor at Dartmouth College, 1973–1975. She and her husband, fellow mathematician Stan Wagon, taught at Smith College, 1975-1990, and at Macalester College, 1990-2007. At both colleges they shared a full-time position in mathematics. She spent sabbaticals, taught, and held visiting positions at Tufts University, Carleton College, University of Colorado Boulder, University of Washington, University of Michigan, Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, California, and University of Colorado Denver. Her research has focused on graph theory and discrete mathematics, specializing mainly in topological and chromatic graph theory and on visibility graphs; for overviews of this work see the first two listed publications. She has also considered algorithmic aspects in these areas, for example, generalizing the planar separator theorem to surfaces. She has published over 75 research and expository papers in graph theory, many with the late Michael O. Albertson, formerly of Smith College. In one of their most cited works, Albertson and Hutchinson completed work of a Danish mathematician. They also wrote together the text Discrete Mathematics with Algorithms. With S. Wagon she has co-authored papers on algorithmic aspects of the Four Color Theorem.

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