Eleanor Gilbert Rieffel (born 1965)[1] is a mathematician interested in quantum computing, computer vision, and cryptography. She is a senior research scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center.[2]
Rieffel earned her Ph.D. in 1993 from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her dissertation, Groups Coarse Quasi-Isometric to the Hyperbolic Plane Cross the Real Line, concerned geometric group theory, and was supervised by Geoffrey Mess.[3] After working for FX Palo Alto Laboratory, she joined NASA in 2012.[2] In 2019 she won the NASA Exceptional Engineering Achievement Medal.[4]
With Wolfgang Polak, Rieffel is the author of the book Quantum Computing: A Gentle Introduction (MIT Press, 2011).[5]