Rodica Simion

Rodica Eugenia Simion (January 18, 1955 – January 7, 2000) was a Romanian-American mathematician. She was the Columbian School Professor of Mathematics at George Washington University. Her research concerned combinatorics: she was a pioneer in the study of permutation patterns, and an expert on noncrossing partitions.

Biography Simion was one of the top competitors in the Romanian national mathematical olympiads. She graduated from the University of Bucharest in 1974, and immigrated to the United States in 1976. She did her graduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania, earning a Ph.D. in 1981 under the supervision of Herbert Wilf. After teaching at Southern Illinois University and Bryn Mawr College, she moved to George Washington University in 1987, and became Columbian School Professor in 1997.

Research contributions Simion's thesis research concerned the concavity and unimodality of certain combinatorially defined sequences, and included what Richard P. Stanley calls "a very influential result" that the zeros of certain polynomials are all real. a simsun permutation is a permutation in which, for all k, the subsequence of the smallest k elements has no three consecutive elements in decreasing order.

Simion also did extensive research on noncrossing partitions, and became "perhaps the world's leading authority" on them. She was also a leader in George Washington University's annual Summer Program for Women in Mathematics. her poem "Immigrant Complex" was published in a collection of mathematical poetry in 1979.

Selected publications . . . .