Pamela Gorkin
Pamela Gorkin is an American mathematician specializing in complex analysis and operator theory. She is a professor of mathematics at Bucknell University. Education and career Gorkin earned bachelor's and master's degrees in statistics from Michigan State University in 1976. She then shifted to pure mathematics for her doctoral studies, completing her Ph.D. at Michigan State in 1982, the same year she joined the Bucknell Faculty. Her dissertation, Decompositions of the Maximal Ideal Space of L, was supervised by Sheldon Axler. At Bucknell, she was Presidential Professor from 2001 to 2004. Books With Ulrich Daepp, Gorkin is the author of the undergraduate textbook Reading, Writing, and Proving: A Closer Look at Mathematics (Springer, 2003; 2nd ed., 2011). With Daepp, Andrew Shaffer, and Karl Voss, she is the author of Finding Ellipses: What Blaschke Products, Poncelet’s Theorem, and the Numerical Range Know about Each Other (Carus Mathematical Monographs, MAA Press, 2018). The book studies a connection between Blaschke products, Poncelet's closure theorem, and the numerical range of matrices. A Blaschke product is a certain kind of mapping of the unit disk in the complex plane to itself, and the ones considered in the first part of the book have order three (they