Yael Dowker

Yael Naim Dowker (; born Yael Naim; 30 October 1919 – 28 January 2016) was an Israeli-born English mathematician, prominent especially due to her work in the fields of measure theory, ergodic theory and topological dynamics.

Biography Yael Naim (later Dowker) was born in Tel Aviv.

Dowker did her doctorate at Radcliffe College (in Cambridge, Massachusetts) under Witold Hurewicz (a Polish mathematician known for the Hurewicz theorem). She published her thesis Invariant measure and the ergodic theorems in 1947 and received her Ph.D. in 1948. In the period between 1948 and 1949, she did post-doctoral work at the Institute for Advanced Study, located in Princeton, New Jersey. A few years after the war, McCarthyism became a common phenomenon in the academic world, with several of the Dowker couple's friends in the mathematical community harassed and one arrested. In 1950, they emigrated to the United Kingdom. and later went to the Imperial College London, where she was the first female reader within the department.

Works Invariant measure and the ergodic theorems, Duke Math. J. 14 (1947), 1051–1061 Finite and -finite measures, Annals of Mathematics, 54 (1951), 595–608 The mean and transitive points of homeomorphisms, Annals of Mathematics, 58 (1953), 123–133 On limit sets in dynamical systems, Proc. London Math. Soc. 4 (1954), 168–176 (with Friedlander, F. G.) On minimal sets in dynamical systems, Quart. J. Math. Oxford Ser. (2) 7 (1956), 5–16 Some examples in ergodic theory, Proc. London Math. Soc. 9 (1959), 227–241 (with Erdős, Paul)