Yael Dowker

Yael Naim Dowker (1919-January 2016, born as Yael Naim) was an Israeli-English mathematician, prominent especially due to her work in the fields of measure theory, ergodic theory and topological dynamics.

Born in Tel Aviv she eventually went to study in the United States at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. As a graduate student, in 1941 she met Clifford Hugh Dowker, a Canadian topologist working as an instructor there. The couple married in 1944. During the period between 1943 and 1946 the two of them worked together at the Radiation Laboratory at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Clifford also working as a civilian adviser for the United States Air Force during World War II.

Eventually Yael became a doctoral student at Radcliffe College (in Cambridge, Massachusetts), with Witold Hurewicz (a Polish mathematician known for the Hurewicz theorem) as her advisor. She published her thesis Invariant measure and the ergodic theorems in 1947 and received her Ph.D in 1948. In the period between 1948 and 1949, she did post-doctoral work at the Institute for Advanced Study, located in Princeton, New Jersey. A few years after the war, McCarthyism became a common phenomenon in the academic world, with several of the Dowker couple's friends in the mathematical community harassed, and one arrested. In 1950, they made the decision to emigrate to the United Kingdom.

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