Alexandra Bellow - Biography

Biography

She was born in Bucharest, Romania, on August 30, 1935, as Alexandra Bagdasar. Her parents were both physicians. Her mother, Florica Bagdasar, was a child psychiatrist. Her father, Dumitru Bagdasar, was a neurosurgeon (in fact, he founded the Romanian school of neurosurgery, after having obtained his training in Boston, at the clinic of the world pioneer of neurosurgery, Dr. Harvey Cushing). For more details about her parents and her early life, see article. She received her M.S. in Mathematics from the University of Bucharest in 1957, where she met and married her first husband, Cassius Ionescu Tulcea. She came to the United States in 1957, and received her Ph.D from Yale in 1959 under the direction of Shizuo Kakutani. After receiving her degree, she worked as a research associate at Yale from 1959 until 1961, and as an Assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania from 1962 to 1964. From 1964 until 1967 she was an Associate professor at the University of Illinois. In 1967 she moved to Northwestern University as a professor of mathematics. She was at Northwestern until her retirement in 1996, when she became Professor Emeritus.

During her marriage to Ionescu Tulcea (1956–1969) she and her husband wrote a number of papers together, as well as the research monograph on Lifting Theory.

Alexandra’s second husband was the writer Saul Bellow who was awarded the Nobel Prize (1976), during this marriage (1974–1985). Alexandra features in Bellow's writings; she is portrayed lovingly in his memoir To Jerusalem and Back (1976), and, his novel "The Dean's December" (1982), more critically, satirically in his last novel "Ravelstein" (2000) - which was written many years after their divorce. The decade of the nineties was for Alexandra a period of personal and professional fulfillment, brought about by her marriage in 1989 to the mathematician, Alberto P. Calderón. For more details about her personal and professional life see her autobiographical article.