Elizabeth Hirschfelder

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Elizabeth Thatcher (Hirschfelder) Stafford (born April 25, 1902 in Providence , United States , † September 29, 2002 in Madison ) was an American mathematician and university professor.

life and work

Hirschfelder was the eldest child of Evangeline K. (Flagg) (1877-1966), a direct descendant of Roger Williams , founder of Rhode Island , and the banker Arthur Ervin Stafford (born 1875), born in Providence. From 1918 she attended the Women's College of Brown, later Pembroke College in Brown University , where she received her bachelor's degree in 1923 and her master 's degree in 1924. Then she was a lecturer in pure mathematics at the University of Texas at Austin and was hired from 1925 to 1928 as an associate professor at Texas Tech University in Lubbock . In 1928 she studied at theUniversity of Chicago and in the same year a scholarship in mathematics from the University of Wisconsin – Madison . In 1930 she was the first doctoral student to do her doctorate under Mark Hoyt Ingraham with the dissertation: Matrices Conjugate to a Given Matrix with Respect to its Minimum Equation. In 1931 she married the Russian mathematician Ivan Sokolnikoff . She worked as a lecturer at the University of Wisconsin until 1932, teaching army and naval groups, geologists and engineers there during the war years. In 1947, after her divorce, she was appointed assistant professor of mathematics. In 1953 she married Joseph O. Hirschfelder and in 1954 gave up her position as assistant professor of mathematics in order to be able to accompany her husband on lecture tours. In honor of her deceased husband, she helped organize the Joseph O. Hirschfelder Prize for Theoretical Chemistry in 1991 and made a donation for an addition to the university's chemistry building. She also provided funding that led to the creation of a Fund for Graduates in Mathematics, Chemistry, and Physics for the University of Wisconsin Foundation in 1997 . She left behind significant bequests such as the Broida-Hirschfelder Foundation at the University of California and the University of Wisconsin.

Memberships

Publications (selection)

  • 1930: Stafford, ET: Matrices conjugate to a given matrix with respect to its minimum equation. PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin
  • 1930: with HS Vandiver: Determination of some properly irregular cyclotomic fields. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA 16
  • 1933: Matrices conjugate to a given matrix with respect to its minimum equation. Amer. J. Math. 55
  • 1934: with IS Sokolnikoff: Higher Mathematics for Engineers and Physicists. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co. Reviews: Amer. Math. Monthly 41
  • 1934: with IS Sokolnikoff: Note on a resolution of linear differential systems. Proc. Edinburgh Math. Soc. 2nd ser. 4th
  • 1935: with IS Sokolnikoff: The problem of Dirichlet for an ellipsoid. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA 21
  • 1935: with IS Sokolnikoff: The problem of Dirichlet for an ellipsoid, Terrestr. Mag. Atmosh. Electr. 40
  • 1939: with IS Sokolnikoff: Thermal stresses in elastic plates. Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 45

literature

  • Judy Green, Jeanne LaDuke: Pioneering Women in American Mathematics: The Pre-1940 PhD's, 2009, ISBN 978-0-8218-4376-5 .
  • Marilyn Bailey Ogilvie: The Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science: Pioneering Lives from Ancient Times to the Mid-20th Century, 2000, ISBN 978-0415920384

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Hirschfelder, Elizabeth
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Stafford, Elizabeth Thatcher ((maiden name)); Sokolnikoff, Elizabeth Stafford
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American mathematician and university professor
DATE OF BIRTH April 25, 1902
PLACE OF BIRTH Providence
DATE OF DEATH September 29, 2002
Place of death Madison