Born: 30 August 1935, Romania
Died: NA
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Alexandra Bagdasar
Born in Bucharest to neuropsychiatrist Florica Bagdasar (the country’s first woman minister), Alexandra Bellow emigrated to the U.S. after completing her Master’s in mathematics at the University of Bucharest in 1957. She earned her Ph.D. from Yale in 1959 with a dissertation on Ergodic Theory of Random Series. She worked as a research associate at Yale (1959-1961), then as an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania (1962-1964). From 1964 to 1967 she was an associate professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, before becoming Northwestern University’s first female full professor of mathematics. She stayed at Northwestern until her retirement in 1996, when she became Professor Emeritus. In her early career, she collaborated with her first husband, Cassius Ionescu-Tulcea, on lifting theory and martingales; she also did extensive work in the area of ergodic theory.