Marion Walter

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Marion Walter (born July 30, 1928 in Berlin ) is a mathematician and mathematics didactician. Before her retirement, she was a professor of mathematics and taught at various educational institutions and organizations. The Marion theorem was named after her.

Early childhood in National Socialist Germany

Walter was born in Berlin in 1928. Her parents, Willy Walter (who died in an internment camp in 1943 ), a fashion jewelry dealer in Berlin, and Erna Else Walter were Jewish. She first attended a public school before she and her sister, Ellen Paula Walter, who was two and a half years older, were sent to a Jewish boarding school in Herrlingen a year after an incident with their math teacher . When Marion Walter met her math teacher on the street at the age of 7, but did not call back " Heil Hitler ", she had to explain the incident. In the end, her math teacher decided not to report the incident, on the grounds that Marion Walter was her best student in arithmetic. Mathematics was one of the few topics Marion Walter was able to talk about during the Nazi era .

In 1939 , she and her sister left Germany on a Kindertransport that was used to evacuate thousands of Jewish children to England before the outbreak of World War II . Her parents moved in later that year.

Living in England

In England, Marion Walter attended boarding school in Eastbourne with her older sister . Most of the language subjects were difficult for her because of her lack of English skills. She had to derive much of the content of the lesson herself. Her interest in mathematics and especially geometry remained in England.

As a result of the war, after France surrendered in 1940, the students from the boarding school were to be evacuated. Marion Walter was evacuated to Wykey, a hamlet in Shropshire , with the remaining students, where they had to sleep in converted dog kennels and were taught in chicken coops. Marion Walter and her classmates later moved to Combermere Abbey , where they spent the rest of the time until the end of the war.

In 1944, Marion Walter was asked to teach mathematics because she had received an award on her Cambridge University School Certificate and the only math teacher had spontaneously resigned. She taught mathematics to students aged 5 to 16 for two semesters. In 1945 she studied mathematics and education at Regent Street Polytechnic (today: University of Westminster ) in London. After completing her bachelor's degree in mathematics, she moved to New York City with her mother and sister .

Career in the USA

In New York City, Marion earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics and education from Hunter College in 1950 . She then taught at Hunter College High School and George Washington High School. During this time she also attended evening classes for a Masters in Mathematics at New York University . A few semesters later, Marion Walter stopped teaching at the two universities and took a position as a research assistant for calculations at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University . In the summers of 1952 and 1953, she received a summer scholarship from the National Bureau of Standards to study at the Institute for Numerical Analysis at the University of California . During the summer of 1953 , Marion Walter met the mathematician Olga Taussky-Todd , who encouraged her to complete her master's degree. In 1954 she received a master's degree in mathematics from New York University .

Instead of the Ph.D. Marion Walter decided to resume teaching and took a (part-time) position as a teaching assistant at Cornell University .

In 1956 she accepted a one-year job at Simmons College in Boston . Simmons College did not major in mathematics at the time. Towards the end of her contract term, she was offered such a major at Simmons College. Marion Walter spent a total of nine years at Simmons College, including four years as the head of the math department.

Visual representation of a triangle with trisected sides.
Visual representation of Marion's theorem.

In 1960 she received a summer scholarship from the National Science Foundation at Stanford University , where one of her teachers was George Pólya . In the summers from 1962 to 1967 she took part in the Elementary Science Study at the Education Development Center (EDC) in Newton, Massachusetts , where she worked on the development of curricula for mathematics. In addition, she has been a math advisor on several projects, including the project that ultimately became Sesame Street . She worked as a UNESCO math education advisor in Israel , taught at the State University of New York in Buffalo , was a research assistant at the Children's Hospital in Boston , gave workshops and published articles, chapters in books and books for children. While in Massachusetts, she founded the Boston Area Mathematics Specialists, a group focused on improving the teaching and learning of mathematics for school children. After receiving her doctorate, Marion Walter was employed at the Harvard Graduate School of Education , where she was able to teach teachers from elementary and secondary schools. During this time she also worked with a student friend and colleague from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Stephen Brown, leading to the publication of The Art of Problem Posing in 1983.

In 1977 she accepted an apprenticeship at the University of Oregon , where she taught until her retirement in 1994.

In the last year before her retirement, in 1993 , Marion Walter set up the Marion Theorem, which states that the area of ​​the central hexagon of a triangle, which is created by trisection of each side, is exactly one tenth of the total area of ​​the triangle.

Awards

In 1973 and 1986 she was recognized for two of her books by the New York Academy of Sciences program for children's book awards. In 2003 she was elected to the Massachusetts Hall of Fame for math educators. In 2010 she received an honorary degree from Simmons College. The Marion Walter Future Teachers Award is presented in her honor by the Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Oregon. Marion Walter's theorem, named after her in 1993, is based on the following question: If the sides of a triangle are three-part, what is the resulting area of ​​the hexagon that was created?

Publications (selection)

  • with Stephen I Brown: The Art of Problem Posing, Teaching Children Mathematics 12 (8), 2006
  • Make a Bigger Puddle, Make a Smaller Worm, The Arithmetic Teacher 20 (1), 1973
  • The Mirror Puzzle Book, The Arithmetic Teacher 34 (1), 1986
  • with Stephen I Brown: Problem Posing: Reflections and Applications, The Mathematics Teacher 87 (1), 1994
  • Look at Annette , 1971, ISBN 978-0-87131-071-2
  • Another, Another, Another and More , 1975, ISBN 978-0-233-96644-1
  • Boxes, Squares and Other Things , 1970, ISBN 978-0-87353-410-9

as well as expansion sets for some of their mirroring textbooks.

literature

  • Charlene Morrow, Teri Peri: Notable Women in Mathematics, Greenwood Press, 1998
  • Klaus Scharff: Kuriosa Mathematika: Strange Mathematics - Enigmatic Numbers - Magic Numbers, 2020, ISBN 978-3-7519-3245-5
  • Franz Lemmermeyer: Mathematics à la Carte, elementary geometry on square roots with some historical remarks, Springer, 2015, ISBN 978-3-662-45269-1

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i Charlene Morrow and Teri Perl (eds.): Notable Women in mathematics: a biographical dictionary . Greenwood Press, Westport 1998, ISBN 0-313-29131-4 , pp. 267-272 .
  2. ↑ a b Cuoco, Goldenberg and Mark: Marion's theorem . In: The Mathematics Teacher . tape 86 , no. 8 , 1993, pp. 619 .
  3. ↑ Jennifer Ruef: Celebrating Marion Walter - and other unsung female mathematicians. In: The Conversation. March 12, 2018, accessed June 21, 2020 .
  4. ^ A b John J. O'Connor and Edmund F. Robertson: Marion Ilse Walter. In: MacTutor. University of St. Andrews, November 2017, accessed August 1, 2020 .
  5. ↑ a b c d Marion Walter. In: Women in Math. University of Oregon, accessed June 21, 2020 .
  6. ^ Deborah A. Green: Oral history interview with Marion Walter and Shlomo Liebeskind. In: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, May 1, 2001, accessed June 21, 2020 .
  7. ↑ ABOUT BAMS. Accessed June 21, 2020 (English).
  8. ^ John J. O'Connor and Edmund F. Robertson: Marion Walter's books. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics. November 11, 2017, accessed June 21, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME Walter, Marion
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Walter, Marion Ilse
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German mathematician and university professor
DATE OF BIRTH July 30, 1928
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin