Magdalena Toda

Magdalena Daniela Toda is a Romanian-American mathematician, a professor of mathematics and the former chair of the Department of Mathematics & Statistics at Texas Tech University. Her research focuses on the curvature of surfaces, geometric flow, the geometry of timelike surfaces, and the uses of differential geometry and partial differential equations in scientific and engineering applications.

Education and career

Toda did her early education in Romania, but is currently a US citizen. She earned a licenciate (effectively a combined bachelor's and master's degree) in mathematics from the University of Bucharest in 1991. After moving to the US, she continued her education at the University of Kansas, where she earned a second master's degree in 1997 and completed her Ph.D. in 2000, also receiving at the same time a Ph.D. from the Politehnica University of Bucharest.^[1] Her dissertation, Pseudospherical Surfaces via Moving Frames and Loop Groups, was jointly supervised by Josef Dorfmeister at the University of Kansas, and Constantin Udriște of the Politehnica University of Bucharest.^[2]

She became an assistant professor at Ball State University in 2000, and moved to her present position at Texas Tech in 2001. There, she was tenured as an associate professor in 2008 and promoted to full professor in 2014. She became interim department chair in 2015 and permanent chair since 2016, with a leave in 2022–2023 to serve as program director for applied mathematics at the National Science Foundation.^[1]

Recognition

The Association for Women in Mathematics named Toda to their 2025 Class of AWM Fellows, "for her outstanding leadership in supporting women and girls in mathematics, most notably through the longstanding Emmy Noether High School Days, as well as her service to AWM and local and national committees working towards equity".^[3]

Books

Toda is the editor of the research monograph Willmore Energy and Willmore Conjecture (CRC Press / Chapman & Hall 2017). She was added as a coauthor to the 2013 6th edition of the textbook Calculus, by Gerald L. Bradley and Karl J. Smith.