Alexandra Bellow

Alexandra Bellow (formerly Alexandra Ionescu Tulcea; born 30 August 1935) is a mathematician from Bucharest, Romania, who has made contributions to the fields of ergodic theory, probability and analysis.

Biography

Bellow was born in Bucharest, Romania, on August 30, 1935, as Alexandra Bagdasar. Her parents were both physicians. Her mother, Florica Bagdasar, was a child psychiatrist. Her father, Dumitru Bagdasar, was a neurosurgeon (in fact, he founded the Romanian school of neurosurgery, after having obtained his training in Boston, at the clinic of the world pioneer of neurosurgery, Dr. Harvey Cushing). She received her M.S. in mathematics from the University of Bucharest in 1957, where she met and married her first husband, Cassius Ionescu Tulcea. She accompanied her husband to the United States in 1957 and received her Ph.D from Yale in 1959 under the direction of Shizuo Kakutani. After receiving her degree, she worked as a research associate at Yale from 1959 until 1961, and as an Assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania from 1962 to 1964. From 1964 until 1967 she was an Associate professor at the University of Illinois. In 1967 she moved to Northwestern University as a professor of mathematics. She was at Northwestern until her retirement in 1996, when she became Professor Emeritus.