Jane Cronin Scanlon


Jane Smiley Cronin Scanlon was an American mathematician and an emeritus professor of mathematics at Rutgers University. Her research concerned partial differential equations and mathematical biology.

Education and career

Scanlon earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Wayne State University. She completed her Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of Michigan in 1949, under the supervision of Erich Rothe. Her dissertation was Branch Points of Solutions of Equations in Banach Space.
After working for the United States Air Force and the American Optical Company, she returned to academia as a lecturer at Wheaton College and then Stonehill College.
She moved to the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn in 1957, and to Rutgers in 1965. She retired in 1991.
She died in June 2018 at the age of 95.

Recognition

Scanlon was a Noether Lecturer in 1985, and Pi Mu Epsilon J. Sutherland Frame Lecturer in 1989. Her talks concerned "entrainment of frequency" and the application of this principle to mathematical models of the Purkinje fibers in the heart. In 2012, she became one of the inaugural fellows of the American Mathematical Society.