Alice Roth Lectures
This annual lecture series was established in honour of Alice Roth (1905–1977), the first* woman to obtain a doctorate with a thesis in mathematics at ETH Zürich in 1938.
Alison Etheridge – 2024 Alice Roth lecturer
Alison Etheridge is Professor of Probability at the University of Oxford. She has made significant contributions to the theory of probability and its applications to mathematical ecology and mathematical population genetics. external page Personal website
The lecture took place on 5 March 2024.
About the Alice Roth Lectures
external page Alice Roth’s thesis was awarded an ETH Silver Medal and was the first thesis by a woman in the whole of ETH to obtain this distinction. Alice Roth then worked as teacher in a private school in Bern, and only returned to do research in mathematics when she retired.
By the age of 70 she was lecturing for the first time about her work outside Switzerland. Her area of research was approximation theory and complex analysis; her thesis contained an example that was rediscovered by Sergey Mergelyan in 1951, and named after him until her prior work was itself rediscovered.
The Alice Roth Lectures will be held by women with outstanding achievements in mathematics and are coordinated by the Alice Roth committee consisting of Sarah Zerbes (chair), Menny Akka, Rima Alaifari, Mikaela Iacobelli and Emmanuel Kowalski.
Video portrait about Alice Roth
Further information about Alice Roth and her work
Articles about Alice Roth
- external page Alice in Switzerland: The life and mathematics of Alice Roth
- Biography written by external page Larry Riddle
- Article on external page Wikipedia
Articles by Alice Roth
- Roth, Alice: Uniform approximation by meromorphic functions on closed sets with continuous extension into the boundary. Canadian J. Math. 30 (1978), no. 6, 1243–1255.
- Gauthier, P. M.; Roth, A.; Walsh, J. L.: Possibility of uniform rational approximation in the spherical metric. Canadian J. Math. 28 (1976), no. 1, 112–115.
- Roth, Alice: Uniform and tangential approximations by meromorphic functions on closed sets. Canadian J. Math. 28 (1976), no. 1, 104–111.
- Roth, Alice: Meromorphe Approximationen. (German) Comment. Math. Helv. 48 (1973), 151–176.
Thesis
- Roth, Alice: Approximationseigenschaften und Strahlengrenzwerte meromorpher und ganzer Funktionen. (German) Comment. Math. Helv. 11 (1938), no. 1, 77–125.
*Elsa Frenkel got a doctoral degree in mathematics in 1913. However in those times mathematics and physics were not really separated and external page Frenkel's thesis was in astronomy, more precisely on sunspots.
Contact
ETH Zürich
Department of Mathematics
Rämistrasse 101
8092
Zurich
Switzerland