Marion Cameron Gray

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Gray graph

Marion Cameron Gray (born March 26, 1902 in Ayr , Scotland , † September 16, 1979 in Edinburgh , Scotland) was a Scottish -American mathematician . She discovered an unusual semi-symmetric cubic graph with 54 vertices, which is the smallest possible cubic semisymmetric graph. This graph is commonly known as the Gray graph.

Life

She attended the Ayr High School from 1907 to 1913 and the Ayr Academy from 1913 to 1919. In 1919 she enrolled at the University of Edinburgh, where she graduated with honors in mathematics and natural philosophy in 1922 . She then spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow with Edmund Taylor Whittaker in mathematics at the university. She joined the Edinburgh Mathematical Society, was elected to the Society's committee in 1923, and remained a member for life. In 1937 she received American citizenship. After her retirement she returned to Edinburgh.

Research and Impact

In 1924 she traveled to the USA with the support of a British graduate scholarship and a Carnegie scholarship to do her PhD at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania with Anna Pell Wheeler . Her research topic was "A Boundary Value Problem of Ordinary Self-Adjugate Differential Equations with Singularities". After completing her PhD, she returned to Edinburgh to work as a University Assistant in Natural Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh . After a year she went to Imperial College London as a mathematics assistant for three years . She returned to the United States in 1930 and was appointed Assistant Engineer in the Development and Research Department of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company in New York . There she discovered an unusual semi-symmetric cubic graph with 54 vertices, where each vertex is the end point of three edges. This graph is the smallest possible cubic semisymmetric graph. She did not publish these results, however, and Bouwer discovered it in 1968 in response to a question from Jon Folkman . He described it and explained how to answer questions about symmetry types. Bouwer wrote to Gray that she discovered the graph at a time when graph theory did not yet exist. The graph is commonly known as the Gray graph. From 1934 until her retirement, she worked at Bell Telephone Laboratories, where, in addition to her own research articles, she compiled numerous overviews of publications on mathematical physics and was a member of the US government committee that published the Handbook of Mathematical Functions in 1964.

Honors

  • 2013: Inclusion in the National Library of Science exhibition "Celebrating Scottish Women of Science"

Publications (selection)

  • Marion C. Gray: Note on some Self-Reciprocal Functions in the Double Fourier Transform, J. London Math. Soc., 1931, pp. 247-250
  • Marion C. Gray: A modification of Hallén's solution of the antenna problem, J. Appl. Phys. 15, 1944, pp. 61-65
  • Marion C. Gray, SA Schelkunoff: The approximate solution of linear differential equations. Bell System Tech. J. 27, 1948, pp. 350-364
  • Marion C. Gray: Legendre functions of fractional order, Quart. Appl. Math. 11, 1953, pp. 311-318
  • Marion C. Gray: Bessel functions of integral order and complex argument, Comm. ACM 4, 1961, p. 169

literature

  • Judy Green, Jeanne LaDuke: Pioneering Women in American Mathematics: The Pre-1940 PhD's, 2009 (Biography with reference to American naturalization, p. 188)

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Gray, Marion Cameron
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Scottish-American mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH March 26, 1902
PLACE OF BIRTH Ayr , Scotland
DATE OF DEATH 16th September 1979
Place of death Edinburgh , Scotland