Ruth Silverman (born 1936 or 1937, died April 25, 2011)[1] was an American mathematician and computer scientist known for her research in computational geometry. She was one of the original founders of the Association for Women in Mathematics in 1971.[2][3]
Silverman completed a Ph.D. in 1970 at the University of Washington.[4]She was a faculty member at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, an associate professor at Southern Connecticut State College,[5] a computer science instructor at the University of the District of Columbia, and a researcher in the Center for Automation Research at the University of Maryland, College Park.[1]
Silverman's dissertation, Decomposition of plane convex sets,[4] concerned the characterization of compact convex sets in the Euclidean plane that cannot be formed as Minkowski sums of simpler sets.[6]
She became known for her research in computational geometry and particular for highly cited publications on k-means clustering[KM] and nearest neighbor search.[NN] Other topics in Silverman's research include robust statistics[LT] and small sets of points that meet every line in finite projective planes.[IP]