Margaret Gurney

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Margaret Gurney (born October 28, 1908 in Washington, DC , † March 19, 2002 in Quilcene , Washington ) was an American mathematician, statistician and computer programmer.

Life

Gurney studied on a scholarship at Swarthmore College in 1926 after graduating from high school , where she completed her bachelor's degree in mathematics, physics, and astronomy with honors in 1930 . She then obtained a master’s degree from Brown University in 1931 and traveled from 1932 to 1933 as a scholarship holder to the Georg August University in Göttingen . In 1934 she did her doctorate at Brown University under Jacob Tamarkin with the dissertation "Some General Existence Theorems for Partial Differential Equations of Hyperbolic Type". From 1935 to 1938 she taught in schools in Pennsylvania and Connecticut . In 1938 she worked first as a statistical advisor and from 1940 as an economist for the Budget Bureau. She moved to the United States Census Bureau in 1944 , where she was involved in planning sample-based surveys and implemented her methods on UNIVAC I , the first commercial computer in the USA. From 1961 until her retirement, she also worked as an international statistical advisor, teaching statistical methods and agricultural statistics in developing countries in collaboration with the US Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics. She began this work in Puerto Rico and later continued it in Central and South America, Africa and Southeast Asia .

Awards

Publications (selection)

  • Gurney, Margaret: "Cesàro summability of double series", Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, 38, 1932
  • Hansen, Morris H .; Hurwitz, William N .; Gurney, Margaret: "Problems and methods of the sample survey of business," Journal of the American Statistical Association, 41, 1946
  • Dalenius, gates; Gurney, Margaret: “The problem of optimum stratification. II ", Scandinavian Actuarial Journal, 1951
  • Gurney, Margaret; Daly, Joseph F .: “A multivariate approach to estimation in periodic sample surveys”, Proceedings of the Social Statistics Section, American Statistical Association, 1961
  • Gurney, Margaret; Jewett, Robert S .: "Constructing orthogonal replications for variance estimation", Journal of the American Statistical, 1975

literature

  • Green, Judy; LaDuke, Jeanne: "Gurney, Margaret", Pioneering Women in American Mathematics: The Pre-1940 PhD's, History of Mathematics, 34, American Mathematical Society, pp. 191–192, 2009, ISBN 978-0-8218-4376-5
  • Patricia C. Kenschaft: Change Is Possible: Stories of Women and Minorities in Mathematics, 2005, ISBN 978-0-8218-3748-1

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Gurney, Margaret
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American mathematician, statistician, and computer programmer
DATE OF BIRTH October 28, 1908
PLACE OF BIRTH Washington, DC
DATE OF DEATH March 19, 2002
Place of death Quilcene , Washington