Bodil Branner

Bodil Branner (born 5 February 1943, in Aarhus) is a retired Danish mathematician, one of the founders of European Women in Mathematics and a former chair of the Danish Mathematical Society. Her research concerned holomorphic dynamics and the history of mathematics.^[1]

Education and career

Branner studied mathematics and physics at Aarhus University, where mathematician Svend Bundgaard was one of her mentors, and in 1967 earned a master's degree (the highest degree then available) under the supervision of Leif Kristensen. She had intended to travel to the U.S. for a doctorate, but her husband, a chemist, took an industry job in Copenhagen. Branner could not get a job as a high school teacher because she did not have a teaching qualification, but Bundgaard found her a position as a faculty assistant for Frederik Fabricius-Bjerre at the Technical University of Denmark. Despite this not beginning as an actual faculty position, she eventually earned tenure there in the 1970s.^[1] She was the first woman to chair the Danish Mathematical Society, from 1998 to 2002.^[2] She retired in 2008.^[1]

Recognition

A symposium in honor of Branner's 60th birthday was held in Holbæk in 2003, and published as a festschrift in 2006.^[3] In 2012, she became one of the inaugural fellows of the American Mathematical Society.^[4]

Selected publications

• Branner, Bodil;
  MR 0945011
  .
• Branner, Bodil (1989), "The Mandelbrot set", Chaos and fractals (Providence, RI, 1988), Proc. Sympos. Appl. Math., vol. 39, Amer. Math. Soc., Providence, RI, pp. 75–105,
  MR 1010237
  .
• Branner, Bodil;
  MR 1194004
  .
• Branner, Bodil; Johansen, Nils Voje (1999), "Caspar Wessel (1745–1818). Surveyor and mathematician", Matematisk-fysiske Meddelelser, 46 (1): 9–61,
  MR 1956505
  .