Brenda MacGibbon | |
---|---|
Born | July 31, 1944 |
Died | October 7, 2022 Montreal, Quebec, Canada | (aged 78)
Education | |
Spouse | John Taylor |
Children | 3 |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Mathematics |
Thesis | K-Analytic Spaces and Countable Operations in Topology (1970) |
Doctoral advisor | Donald A. Dawson |
Kathryn Brenda MacGibbon-Taylor (July 31, 1944 – October 7, 2022) was a Canadian mathematician, statistician, and decision scientist. She was a professor of mathematics at the Université du Québec à Montréal[1] and was affiliated with the Group for Research in Decision Analysis.[2]
MacGibbon began her career in pure mathematics, at McGill University. She earned a master's degree there in 1966, working with Michael Herschorn on differential equations,[3] and completed a Ph.D. in 1970, with a dissertation on topology supervised by Donald A. Dawson.[4][5]
As well as McGill and the Université du Québec à Montréal, she has also been affiliated with the Department of Decision Sciences and Management Information Systems at Concordia University in Montreal, where she was hired in 1986.[6] By 1993 she had moved to the Université du Québec à Montréal.[4]
Although MacGibbon's research has covered a wide range of topics in statistics,[4] including applications of statistics in the study of premenstrual syndrome,[7] and the use of smart shoes to monitor the rehabilitation of patients with hip fractures,[8] she was particularly known for her work in theoretical statistics on minimax estimators with constrained parameters.[4]
MacGibbon became the first woman to chair the Statistical Sciences Grant Selection Committee of the Canadian Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, in 1993.[4] She was a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.[9]
MacGibbon was married to John Taylor, with whom she had 3 children. She died from complications of Alzheimer's disease and ALS on October 7, 2022, at the age of 78.[10]