Eleanor Pairman

Eleanor Pairman (born June 8, 1896 in Lasswade , Scotland , † September 14, 1973 in White River Junction , Vermont ) was an American mathematician and university professor of Scottish origin. She was the third woman to earn a PhD in mathematics from Radcliffe College, Massachusetts. She developed novel methods to teach math to blind students.

Life and research

Pairman was the youngest of her parents' four children and began her education at Lasswade Higher Grade School in 1903. In 1908 she entered George Watson's Ladies College in Edinburgh , and in 1912 she won a George Watson School scholarship that entitle her to free education for 1912-1913. In 1914 she matriculated at the University of Edinburgh and studied mathematics, natural philosophy, chemistry and logic. In 1915 she received the Newton Scholarship for Mathematics, continued her studies with distinction in Mathematics and Natural Philosophy and in 1917 received a Master of Arts with distinction. She was also awarded a Vans Dunlop Mathematics Scholarship to study for three years at the university of her choice. She went to Karl Pearson in the Department of Applied Statistics at University College London for a year as a computer (math assistant). She has published work with Karl Pearson and also wrote Tracts for Computers , published by Cambridge University Press in 1920. She then did research in the United States at Radcliffe College from 1919 . She did her doctorate there in 1922 under George David Birkhoff with the dissertation Expansion Theorems for Solution of a Fredholm's Linear Homogeneous Integral Equation of the Second Kind with Kernel of Special Non-Symmetric Type . In 1922 she married Bancroft Huntington Brown , who also had a PhD in Broomieknowe, Scotland , with whom she had four children. On her return to the United States, she and her husband moved to Hanover , where he had a position at Dartmouth College . She was not allowed to teach at the college founded in 1769 with exclusively male teachers as a men's college. At that time it was almost impossible for married women in particular to work at universities according to their education. However, she took on the task of helping blind students. Although she was not employed as a mathematician after completing her doctorate, she accepted a position as a part-time teacher of mathematics at Dartmouth College in 1955 and taught there for the next four academic years. At the time her husband was BP Cheney professor in Dartmouth. She died after a long illness of breast cancer in a nursing home in White River Junction.

Publications (selection)

1917: On a Difference Equation due to Stirling, Proceedings of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society. 36: 40-60. doi: 10.1017 / S0013091500035227. ISSN 1464-3839.
1919: Tables of the digamma and trigamma functions, Cambridge University Press. OCLC 681090033.
1919: with Pearson, Karl: On corrections for the moment coefficients of limited range frequency distributions when there are finite or infinite ordinates and any slopes at the terminals of the range, Biometrika. 12 (3-4).
1927: with Langer, Rudolph E .; Brown, "On a Class of Integral Equations with Discontinuous Kernels, Transactions of the American Mathematical Society. 29.
2009: Tables of the Digamma and Trigamma Functions: -1919, Cornell University Library, ISBN 978-1112228285 .
1922: Tracts for Computers No 8, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0521046992 .

literature

First Matriculation Book, 1914-1915, Edinburgh University.
Graduates in Arts, 1917, Edinburgh University.
Judy Green, Jeanne LaDuke: Pioneering Women in American Mathematics: The Pre-1940 PhD's. 2009, ISBN 978-0-8218-4376-5 .

Web links

personal data
SURNAME	Pairman, Eleanor
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Brown, Nora
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	American mathematician and university professor of Scottish descent
DATE OF BIRTH	June 8, 1896
PLACE OF BIRTH	Lasswade , Scotland
DATE OF DEATH	September 14, 1973
Place of death	White River Junction , Vermont