Alison Miller

Who is Alison Miller?

Alison Miller is an American mathematician.

Miller was home-schooled in Niskayuna, New York, and in 2000 came in third place in the Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee. She competed for the U.S. in the International Mathematical Olympiad in 2004, where she became the first American female gold medalist.

As an undergraduate, she studied mathematics at Harvard University; while at Harvard, she wrote three research papers in mathematics and won the Elizabeth Lowell Putnam award for outstanding performance by a woman in the Putnam Competition in 2005, 2006, and 2007. She coached American girls participating in the China Girls Mathematical Olympiad in 2007, the first year that the U.S. was represented in that Olympiad. In 2008 she became the co-winner of the Alice T. Schafer Prize for excellence in mathematics by an undergraduate woman from the Association for Women in Mathematics. That year she also received her B.A. degree with Highest Honors in Mathematics from Harvard University. Her senior thesis, for which she won the Hoopes Prize, was titled "Explicit Class Field Theory in Function Fields: Gross-Stark Units and Drinfeld Modules." She was then awarded a Churchill Scholarship to study for a year at the University of Cambridge in England.