Fern Hunt

Summary: Fern Hunt is a prominent mathematician at NIST with diverse research interests.

Fern Hunt is an applied mathematician employed as a prominent researcher in the Mathematical Modeling Group at the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST). The daughter of Jamaican immigrants, she earned a Ph.D. in mathematics in 1978 from the renowned Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University. She recognizes that, “I am here because of the sacrifice of other black people. I am aware of that and immensely grateful.” Before assuming her current position at the NIST, she taught as a professor. Her interest in education and in inspiring and mentoring students has not diminished; in addition to her extensive and varied research, she continues to give mathematics lectures at universities across the country and to work directly with students during the summer.

Fern Hunt’s research interests and applications are highly diverse. Her early work was in mathematical biology, including models of behavior of certain bacteria and models of the genetic evolution of populations in a deteriorating environment. At NIST, she studies the physical and chemical properties of many materials used in industry. She says, “I think of myself as your average Jane and the fact that I can discover these connections—every now and again!—gives me a great deal of satisfaction. It means I’m participating in something that’s at the root of the universe. Mathematics gives you the opportunity to create.” Her work has drawn from many areas, including chaos, dynamical systems, and probability.

A notable example is her work with physicist Robert McMichaels on modeling the Barkhausen effect. The Barkhausen effect, or “Barkhausen noise,” is a phenomenon in which the magnetic output of a metallic object has a jumpy, erratic response to a change in magnetic force (the term “noise” is appropriate, since these erratic jumps can be amplified and heard on a loudspeaker as a static-like click pattern). Using sophisticated mathematical tools, Fern Hunt developed a new, much more accurate statistical model of the phenomenon; the new model was able to explain subtle, experimental observations that the previous model could not. A better understanding of this effect has wide practical applications to all the ferromagnetic data storage devices in society, including disk drives and the magnetic stripe on credit cards.

Another important set of projects for Hunt deals with paints and other surface coverings. She studies paints and other such materials at a microstructural level, both measuring and modeling properties such as light-scattering behavior. One innovation of her research program is the use of computer-rendering software to understand and control much more closely how materials will actually appear to the human eye “in real life.” Research of this kind is expected to lead to improvements in the materials used by industry.

In addition to the applied research problems arising from the NIST projects, Fern Hunt actively studies ergodic theory and dynamical systems. She has expressed the belief that some mathematical research for its own sake, not directly connected to a current project, is very important—it serves to stimulate creativity and to strengthen one’s command of mathematical ideas. This belief is especially important for an applied mathematician such as Hunt, whose NIST projects require the use of mathematical ideas from very diverse and unpredictable parts of mathematics.

Ergodic theory, Fern Hunt’s primary area of theoretical mathematical research, is the study of how certain types of systems evolve over time. A simple ergodic system is the circumference of a circle that is being rotated in increments of one radian; if one follows the trajectory of any single point over time, it will eventually come arbitrarily close to every point on the circle. Ergodic theory turns out to have deep connections to geodesic flow, number theory, representation theory, harmonic analysis, and probability theory. The connection to probability theory, in fact, is through Markov chains, a mathematical tool that Fern Hunt has used frequently in her research, such as her improvements to existing models of the Barkhausen effect. This research area is closely related to the mathematics of chaos and fractals.

Fern Hunt has been dedicated to service, and is a member of a number of important committees and boards; she advises, “be in service to others and the world itself. Also try to look beyond day-to-day difficulty and look at maximizing opportunities here and now. This is what keeps me going.” She has served on the board of trustees for the Department of Energy and for the Biological and Environmental Research Advisory Committee and has also been part of the American Mathematical Society Committee for Education.

Bibliography

Henrion, Claudia. Women in Mathematics: The Addition of Difference. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997.

Hunt, Fern. “A Monte Carlo Approach to the Approximation of Invariant Measures.” Random Computing Dynamics 2 (1994).

Williams, Scott. “Fern Hunt: Mathematician of the African Diaspora.” http://www.math.buffalo.edu/mad/PEEPS/hunt‗ferny.html.