Marguerite Lehr

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Marguerite Lehr (born October 22, 1898 in Baltimore , † December 14, 1987 ) was an American mathematician and university professor .

life and work

Lehr was born the oldest of five children to a grocer. She attended Goucher College , where she specialized in mathematics and took lessons from Clara Latimer Bacon . In 1919 she received her Bachelor of Arts and studied at Bryn Mawr College as the last doctoral student with Charlotte Angas Scott . Since she was deaf by then, she was her assistant answering questions in Scott's classes and holding office hours for her. In 1925 she received her doctorate with the dissertation "The Plane Quintic with Five Cusps" , which was published in 1927 in the American Journal of Mathematics . In 1920 she had received the "President M. Carey Thomas European Fellowship" grant from Bryn Mawr, but postponed it until 1923 when she spent the academic year 1923–1924 at the University of Rome in conjunction with an AAUW European Fellowship. During her stay in Rome, she was appointed mathematics teacher at Bryn Mawr College, a position she accepted upon her return in 1924. She stayed with Bryn Mawr for the remainder of her professional life, becoming an Associate in 1929, Assistant Professor in 1935, Associate Professor in 1937, and Professor of Mathematics in 1955.

She also worked from 1931 to 1932 at Johns Hopkins University , from 1949 to 1950 at the Institut Henri Poincaré in Paris and from 1956 to 1957 at Princeton University . During World War II, she taught mathematics in the war training program at the US Information Bureau at Bryn Mawr and a summer semester at Swarthmore College as part of the V-12 program during the war . Her main interest after 1945 was the theory of probability and its applications as well as mathematics teaching, in particular the use of television for mathematics teaching. From October 1953 to January 1954 she conducted a hugely successful series of television courses on a television program in Philadelphia entitled "University of the Air". In 1957, the National Broadcasting Company hired her as a consultant for a television series on mathematics with guests including Emil Artin , Harold Scott MacDonald Coxeter , Saunders MacLean , William Feller , Richard Courant and many other outstanding mathematicians and teachers. After her retirement, she received the Christine R. and Mary F. Lindback Awards. She was a member of the American Mathematical Society , the Mathematical Association of America , the Institute of Mathematical Statistics , the International Biometric Society , the Awards Committee of the International Federation of University Women, and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation .

Award

  • Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science

literature

  • 1927: "The plane quintic with five cusps," American Journal of Mathematics, Vol. 49, no. 2 (April 1927), 197-214
  • 1931: "Generating involutions of infinite discontinuous Cremona groups of S4 which leave a general cubic variety invariant," with Virgil Snyder, American Journal of Mathematics, Vol. 53, no. 1 (January 1931), 186-194
  • 1932: "Regular linear systems of curves with the singularities of a given curve as base points," American Journal of Mathematics, Vol. 54, No. 3 (July 1932), 471-488
  • 1953: Forward to Children Discover Arithmetic-An Introduction to Structural Arithmetic, by Catherine Stern, Harrup & Co., London
  • 1954: "A television program in mathematics," Bryn Mawr Alumnae Bulletin, Fall 1954, 8–9

"An experiment with television," American Mathematical Monthly, Vol. 62, no. 1 (January 1952): 15-21

  • 1956: "Of dice and men," Goucher Alumnae Quarterly, Fall 1956, 10-13
  • 1971: "Charlotte Angas Scott," in Notable American Women, 1607-1950, Belnap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971, 249-250
  • Judy Green, Jeanne LaDuke: Pioneering Women in American Mathematics: The Pre-1940 PhD’s , 2008, ISBN 978-0821843765
  • Kenschaft, Patricia: "An interview with Marguerite Lehr: In Memoriam," Newsletter of the Association for Women in Mathematics, Vol. 2, pp. 9-11 (1988)
  • Ogilvie, Marilyn Bailey; Harvey, Joy Dorothy: The Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science: L – Z, Taylor & Francis, 2000, ISBN 9780415920407

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Lehr, Marguerite
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American mathematician and university professor
DATE OF BIRTH October 22, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH Baltimore , Maryland
DATE OF DEATH December 14, 1987