NYC HONORS MATH PROFESSOR JOAN BIRMAN
 Mathematician Joan Birman has joined an exclusive group of New York City-based scientists honored for advancing the city's special place as an incubator for scientific and technological progress. This month she was among eight science and technology leaders to receive the Mayor's Award for Excellence in Science and Technology. A Professor of Mathematics at Barnard for three decades and a graduate of the College, Birman has made important contributions to topology; in particular, her work on knots (ordinary knots that you tie in a piece of string) and their invariants has had applications to molecular biology, where DNA strands can be knotted.
The annual Mayor's Award for Excellence in Science and Technology recognizes the importance of scientific and technological breakthroughs in the overall success of New York. Birman was honored with scientists from City College, Columbia, Cornell, and Rockefeller universities, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and the Hardesty & Hanover bridge design firm. She became the first Barnard faculty member to receive this award. (Mayor Bloomberg presided at the official ceremony this month.)
Birman took an extended detour from the normal path to scientific success when, not long after her graduation from Barnard in 1948, she married physicist Joseph Birman. Together, they raised three children. It was not until after youngest child was born, that she decided to take a graduate course. She spent the next eight years earning her doctorate. "To be sure, I was rusty," she wrote in an autobiographical sketch on the American Women in Mathematics website, "but that did not seem insurmountable because, as a compensation, maturity had given me an ability to focus and to concentrate in a way which had seemed impossible 15 years earlier, when I graduated from Barnard."
In a telephone conversation from Israel, where she combined research seminars at Technion (the Israel Institute of Technology) and at Haifa University with a visit to her daughter and grandchildren, Birman said her own path was risky. "I would not advise a young woman to follow the path that I followed because it adds one more obstacle in a field that is filled with obstacles to success. But if an older woman found that her passion for mathematics was there, I would encourage her in every way to go for it."
Birman had always been an outstanding math student as a child and through college. After marriage, she realized that the career of an academic was "totally consuming" and would have conflicted with family life.
"It's hard to do everything all at once," she says. "I was very lucky to have a second chance. My enjoyment of research, and the pleasure that I found in joint research with colleagues, was the key to everything."
Birman earned her Ph.D. at the Courant Institute of New York University in 1968 at age 41 and "with incredible good luck" landed a job teaching at Stevens Institute of Technology. She returned to Barnard in 1973 as Professor of Mathematics and Chair of the Mathematics Department, spending the rest of her academic career at the College. She was named Professor Emeritus and Research Professor of Mathematics in July 2004.
—Suzanne Trimel
For more information, please call (212) 854-2037 or email: strimel@barnard.edu
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