Ellen Gethner, '81, wins Chauvenet Prize

Ellen Gethner, Stan Wagon, and Brian Wick received the prestigious Chauvenet Prize on January 7, 2002 at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in San Diego, California. First awarded in 1925, the Chauvenet Prize is presented by the Mathematical Association of America for an outstanding expository article on a mathematical topic by a member or members of the Association. The distinguished award is given in recognition for the article, "A Stroll through the Gaussian Primes", American Mathematical Monthly, Vol. 105, No. 4, 1998, pp. 327-337. The citation notes . . . This excellent expository article describes the Gaussian moat problem concerning the distribution of the Gaussian primes in the complex plane. The problem was first posed by Basil Gordon at the International Congress of Mathematicians held in Stockholm in 1962 and later popularized by Paul Erdös. If one uses the Gaussian primes as stepping stones, can one walk to infinity with steps of bounded length? It is fascinating and still an unanswered question. Using a very accessible and pleasant style, Ellen Gethner, Stan Wagon, and Brian Wick present the history of and motivation for the problem. The paper includes a proof that the walk to infinity cannot take place on a straight line. It is known that there are regions of any size containing no Gaussian primes, but it is not known whether there are angular sectors not admitting a walk to infinity. The authors then discuss the main problem, of the existence of large moats without Gaussian primes, and describe computational methods that they use. The paper contains striking illustrations of some moats and of the eight-fold symmetry of the set of all Gaussian primes. Ellen Gethner received her AB in 1981 from Smith College, her Ph.D. from Ohio State University in 1992, and is in the final stages of another Ph.D. in Theoretical Computer Science at the University of British Columbia. She taught at Swarthmore, Grinnell, and Claremont McKenna Colleges, and enjoyed a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI). Her research interests span many fields including graph theory, graph algorithms, combinatorics, number theory, computational and discrete geometry, complex analysis, and the surprising connections among them. She has given numerous research talks throughout North America, and continues to enjoy her role as a communicator of mathematics. Stan Wagon is a professor of mathematics at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, and was for many years a professor of Mathematics at Smith College.