Victoria Powers

Victoria Ann Powers (1958 – February 2, 2025) was an American mathematician specializing in algebraic geometry and known for her work on positive polynomials and on the mathematics of electoral systems.

Powers was the author of the book Certificates of Positivity for Real Polynomials—Theory, Practice, and Applications (Springer, 2021).

She was on leave from Emory as a Humboldt Fellow and Alexander von Humboldt research professor at the University of Regensburg in 1991–1992, as a visiting professor at the Complutense University of Madrid in 2002–2003, and as a program officer at the National Science Foundation in 2013–2015.

[5] Powers' work moved from abstract real algebraic geometry to more concrete questions related to positive polynomials in one and several variables and voting theory.

Her collaborators included Bruce Reznick, Eberhard Becker, Mari Castle, Claus Scheiderer and Thorsten Wormann.