Alexandra Bellow

Alexandra Bellow (née Bagdasar; previously Ionescu Tulcea; born 30 August 1935) is a Romanian-American mathematician, who has made contributions to the fields of ergodic theory, probability and analysis. Bellow was born in Bucharest, Romania, on August 30, 1935, as Alexandra Bagdasar. Her parents were both physicians. Her mother, Florica Bagdasar (née Ciumetti), was a child psychiatrist. Her father, Dumitru Bagdasar, was a neurosurgeon. She received her M.S. in mathematics from the University of Bucharest in 1957, where she met and married her first husband, mathematician Cassius Ionescu-Tulcea. She accompanied her husband to the United States in 1957 and received her Ph.D. from Yale University in 1959 under the direction of Shizuo Kakutani with thesis Ergodic Theory of Random Series. After receiving her degree, she worked as a research associate at Yale from 1959 until 1961, and as an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania from 1962 to 1964. From 1964 until 1967 she was an associate professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. In 1967 she moved to Northwestern University as a Professor of Mathematics. She was at Northwestern until her retirement in 1996, when she became Professor Emeritus. During her marriage to Cassius Ionescu-Tulcea (1956–1969), she and her husband co-wrote many papers and a research monograph on lifting theory. Alexandra's second husband was the writer Saul Bellow, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976, during their marriage (1975–1985). Alexandra features in Bellow's writings; she is portrayed lovingly in his memoir To Jerusalem and Back (1976), and, his novel The Dean's December (1982), more critically, satirically in his last novel, Ravelstein (2000), which was written many years after their divorce. The decade of the nineties was for Alexandra a period of personal and professional fulfillment, brought about by her marriage in 1989 to the mathematician Alberto P. Calderón. Some of her early work involved properties and consequences of lifting.