Caryn Navy

Caryn Linda Navy, born on July 5, 1953 in Brooklyn, New York, is an American mathematician and computer scientist who has been blind since childhood and is chiefly known for her work in set-theoretic topology and Braille technology. She began learning Braille in sixth grade, along with the Nemeth Braille system for writing mathematics, and attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1971 to 1975, majoring in mathematics and graduating with the AMITA Senior Academic Award. At the University of Wisconsin-Madison she majored in mathematics with a minor in computer science, using an Optacon device to read textbooks, and received her MA in 1977 and her PhD in 1981 under the topologist Mary Ellen Rudin. Her doctoral thesis, Nonparacompactness in Para-Lindelöf Spaces, was important in the development of metrizability theory, and the spaces she constructed are counterexamples to the conjecture that all para-Lindelöf spaces are paracompact.