Karin Gatermann (1961–2005) was a German mathematician whose research topics included computer algebra, sum-of-squares optimization, toric varieties, and dynamical systems of chemical reactions.
Gatermann was born on December 18, 1961, in Bad Oldesloe. She studied mathematics at the University of Hamburg, earning a diploma in 1986 and completing a Ph.D. in 1990 through the university's Institute for Applied Mathematics. Her 1989 dissertation, Gruppentheoretische Konstruktion von symmetrischen Kubaturformeln [''Group-theoretic construction of symmetric cubature formulas''], was supervised by Bodo Werner.
From 1995 until 2001, Gatermann worked as an assistant lecturer at the Free University of Berlin, earning a habilitation there in 1999.
She came to the University of Western Ontario ("Western University") in Canada from 2001 to 2002, through the support of an Ontario Research Chair in Computer Algebra. After a year in Germany, supported by a Heisenberg Fellowship of the German Research Foundation, she returned to Western University as an assistant professor in 2004, and was awarded a Tier II Canada Research Chair in late 2004. However, by then she had returned to Germany to be treated for cancer, to which she succumbed on January 1, 2005.
A colloquium in honor of Gatermann was held in 2006 in Hamburg. In 2009, a special issue of the Journal of Symbolic Computation was dedicated to the memory of Gatermann.