Ethan Coven Biography
Ethan Monroe Coven was born March 22, 1942 in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Monroe and Rebecca Coven. He graduated from James Madison High School in 1958, and from the University of Rochester with a BA in mathematics in 1962. He received a Ph.D. in mathematics at Yale in 1967, under the supervision of G.A. Hedlund. That year he joined the dynamics group at Wesleyan University. He remained on the faculty for 34 years, becoming Professor Emeritus in 2001. Ethan has also held visiting appointments at the University of Erlangen, IAS (Princeton), IBM (Almaden), and MSRI (Berkeley). At Wesleyan he supervised eight Ph.D. theses, he was department chair for two years, and assistant softball coach for three seasons.
Anyone who knows Ethan can guess which one of these roles he did NOT enjoy. With one exception (tiling the integers), Ethan's research papers have been in dynamical systems, mostly zero-dimensional (symbolic dynamics) and one-dimensional (maps of the interval and circle). At latest count he has written 48 research articles, with 29 co-authors. It is fair to characterize Ethan as a social mathematician. A conversation with Ethan at a conference, or even an email contact with someone with a common interest, has been known to result in co-authored work. His most recent single- authored paper appeared over 25 years ago.
Ethan married Carol Wood in 1967. His sister Judy is also a mathematician, as is her husband Paul Green. Perhaps in self-defense, Ethan's mother became a mathematics teacher as well. There are, however, no mathematicians in the next generation! Ethan and Carol have two daughters, Martha Bess and Emily, and twin grandchildren, Daphne and Noah. All his descendants are major sources of delight for him.
Ethan is a man of strong likes, whose preferences are often linearly ordered, and of strong dislikes. He is a big fan of baseball and basketball. His favorite teams are the Boston Red Sox and the UConn women, respectively. His least favorite teams will remain unnamed. His participatory sports at present are biking and golf. His favorite food is chocolate, and his least favorite (at least on pizza) are mushrooms and anchovies.
