Female Historical Influencers in Automatic Control – Part 3

Women are generally a minority in control. Role models are key when attracting diverse groups. The funding provided by the IFAC activity fund (Round 1 and 2) have resulted in four portraits that have been produced professionally and for which the material is now available online. Results were published in the IFAC World Conference 2023. This project developed and produced additional portraits of women influencers in control.

Activity Organizer

Prof. Margret Bauer, HAW Hamburg, Germany; margret.bauer@haw-hamburg.de

IFAC Sponsor: TC 9.4

Description

Women are generally a minority in control. Role models are key when attracting diverse groups. The funding provided by the IFAC activity fund (Round 1 and 2) have resulted in four portraits that have been produced professionally and for which the material is now available online. The results were published at the last IFAC World Congress.

In the meantime, we have conducted interviews with and gathered material on further four control engineers:

Bozenna Pasik-Duncan, IFAC Fellow since 2014 and recipient of the IFAC Control Education Life-Time Achievement Award 2022.
Ruth Curtain (1941-2018), author of three textbooks, IEEE CSS Fellow and recipient of the W.T. and Idalia Reid Prize for her outstanding research in differential equations and control theory.
Sofya Kovalevskaya (1850-1891) as a pioneer in partial differential equations and mechanics. She studied mathematics and physics with Helmholtz, Kirchhoff and Bunsen in Heidelberg, Germany and was an editor of Acta Mathematica. She won the Prix Bordin of the French Academy of Sciences.
Maria di Benedetto, IFAC Fellow for the contributions to nonlinear and hybrid system theory. (to be added to the website soon)

We have employed the same professional to produce the material in the same format as the previous portraits.
In addition, exhibitions were conducted and the portraits were presented at three IFAC conferences: European Control Conference (ECC) 2024 in Stockholm, Sweden; Symposium on the Advances in PID in Almería, Spain and at the Control Conference Africa (CCA) in Mauritius.

Please find a list of outreach activities here. And the portraits in downloadable format are available here.