Marian Boykan Pour-El (April 29, 1928 – June 10, 2009)[1] was an American mathematical logician who did pioneering work in computable analysis.
[2][3] As a young girl, she performed ballet at the Metropolitan Opera House, and this influenced her later life where she was often more comfortable speaking before large audiences than in small groups.
[5] At Minnesota, her doctoral students included Jill Zimmerman (Ph.D. 1990), later the James M. Beall Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at Goucher College, Maryland.
[2] Her "most famous and surprising result",[6] co-authored with Minnesota colleague J. Ian Richards, was that for certain computable initial conditions, determining the behavior of the wave equation is an undecidable problem.
[2][6][W] Their result was later taken up by Roger Penrose in his book The Emperor's New Mind; Penrose used this result as a test case for the Church–Turing thesis, but concluded that the non-smoothness of the initial conditions makes it implausible that a computational device could use this phenomenon to exceed the limits of conventional computing.
[2][5][6][12][C] Pour-El was elected to the Hunter College Hall of Fame in 1975, and as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1983.
[4] They lived separately for several long intervals, most notably from 1969 to 1975 when her husband taught in Illinois,[2][4] and Pour-El wrote an article in 1981 on how having a long-distance relationship worked for her.