Yael Dowker

Yael Dowker was born in 1919 in Tel Aviv

Yael Dowker was born Yael Naim in Tel Aviv in 1919. She moved to the United States to study at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.

In 1941, as a graduate student, she met the Canadian topologist Clifford Hugh Dowker, and they married in 1944. From 1943 to 1946 the two worked at the Radiation Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

She wrote her doctorate at Radcliffe College under Witold Hurewicz, published her thesis in 1947 and received her Ph.D. in 1948. She then did postdoctoral work at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton from 1948 to 1949.

Amid McCarthyism, the couple moved to the United Kingdom in 1950. In 1951 she became an assistant lecturer at the University of Manchester, and later she was the first female reader in her department at Imperial College London.

At Imperial she advised students including Bill Parry, and she worked with the mathematician Paul Erdős. With her husband she worked with gifted children who struggled at school. She died in January 2016, and Imperial College gives a yearly PhD award in her name.