Ruriko (Rudy) Yoshida is a Japanese-American mathematician and statistician whose research topics have ranged from abstract mathematical problems in algebraic combinatorics to optimized camera placement in sensor networks and the phylogenomics of fungi.
She works at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California as a professor of operations research.
Her parents, who had been supporting her financially, stopped their support when they learned that she was studying mathematics instead of business, and she put herself through school working both as a grader in the mathematics department and in the university's police department.
Part of her work there involved implementing a method of Alexander Barvinok for counting integer points in convex polyhedra by decomposing the input into cones,[3] and her 2004 dissertation was Barvinok's Rational Functions: Algorithms and Applications to Optimization, Statistics, and Algebra.
[1] She is also known as an accomplished teacher of mathematics and statistics as is testified by the provost's announcement [2] and the list of her students [9].