| Carol Saunders Wood | |
| Birth Date: | 9 February 1945 |
| Birth Place: | Pennington Gap, Virginia |
| Nationality: | American |
| Fields: | Mathematics |
| Alma Mater: | Yale University |
| Doctoral Advisor: | Abraham Robinson |
| Known For: | Differentially Closed Fields |
Carol Saunders Wood (born February 9, 1945, in Pennington Gap, Virginia)[1] is a retired American mathematician, the Edward Burr Van Vleck Professor of Mathematics, Emerita, at Wesleyan University.[2] Her research concerns mathematical logic and model-theoretic algebra,[3] and in particular the theory of differentially closed fields.[4]
Wood graduated in 1966 from Randolph-Macon Woman's College, a small United Methodist college in Lynchburg, Virginia.[3] She earned her doctorate in 1971 from Yale University with a dissertation on forcing supervised by Abraham Robinson. At Wesleyan, she served three times as department chair.[1] She was an American Mathematical Society (AMS) Council member at large from 1987 to 1989.[5] She was president of the Association for Women in Mathematics from 1991 to 1993,[3] and served on the board of trustees of the American Mathematical Society from 2002 to 2007.[1] She has served on the AMS Committee on Women in Mathematics since it was formed in 2012 and was chair from 2012 to 2015.[6] She supervised 4 doctoral students at Wesleyan.
Wood was the 1998 commencement speaker for mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley.[7] In 2012, she became one of the inaugural fellows of the American Mathematical Society.[8] In 2017, she was selected as a fellow of the Association for Women in Mathematics in the inaugural class.[9]