Biographical sketch of Barbara Burke Hubbard

Barbara Burke Hubbard founded Matrix Editions in December 2001.

She is the author of Ondes et ondelettes, which won the prix d'Alembert from the French Mathematical Society, and which was published in English as The World According to Wavelets. She is co-author with her husband of Vector Calculus, Linear Algebra, and Differential Forms: A Unified Approach, first published by Prentice Hall. When an instructor at Harvard University told her that Prentice Hall had let the second edition of that book go out of print, she obtained the rights and published the third, fourth, and now fifth edition.

An unfortunate experience with fruit flies in a Nat Sci 5 lab while she was an undergraduate at Harvard University convinced her to abandon thoughts of a career in biology. Anesthetizing drosophila in order to check eye color for an experiment in genetics proved beyond her technical abilities; either she gave too much anesthesia and killed off her subjects or she gave too little and they escaped to join some other students' experiment. So despite her enthusiasm for the double helix, she abandoned science for English literature.

After graduating from Harvard, she worked as science writer and assistant director of the MIT news office and as a newspaper reporter. (While working for the Ithaca Journal she won a national AAAS-Westinghouse science writing award.) She has translated several books from French to English, and has edited books for Springer and Academic Press.

Ms. Hubbard spent her final year of high school in Moscow, where her father was correspondent for the Los Angeles Times.

She is married to John Hubbard, professor of mathematics at Cornell University and professor emeritus the University Aix-Marseille. They lived for a year in Bonn (where the youngest of their four children was born) and for several years in Paris; since 1995 they spend approximately one year in three in Marseille.