Michelle L. Wachs

Michelle Lynn Wachs is an American mathematician who specializes in algebraic combinatorics and works as a professor of mathematics at the University of Miami.

Contributions

Wachs and her advisor Adriano Garsia are the namesakes of the Garsia–Wachs algorithm for optimal binary search trees, which they published in 1977.
She is also known for her research on shellings for simplicial complexes, partially ordered sets, and Coxeter groups, and on random permutation statistics and set partition statistics.

Education

Wachs earned her doctorate in 1977 from the University of California, San Diego, under the supervision of Adriano Garsia. Her dissertation was Discrete Variational Techniques in Finite Mathematics.

Recognition

In 2012 Wachs became one of the inaugural fellows of the American Mathematical Society. In 2013 she and her husband, mathematician Gregory Galloway were recognized as Simons Fellows. A conference in her honor was held in January 2015 at the University of Miami.