Uta Merzbach

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Uta Caecilia Merzbach (born February 9, 1933 in Berlin ; † June 27, 2017 in Georgetown , Texas ) was an American mathematician from Germany.

biography

Uta Caecilia Merzbach was born in Berlin as the daughter of Margarete K. and Ludwig H. Merzbach. During the National Socialist rule, the family was deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp and liberated there in May 1945. After a short time in the Deggendorf DP camp in Bavaria, the family emigrated to the United States in 1946 and shortly afterwards settled in Georgetown (Texas) . Her mother initially taught at Southwestern University , and her father later became a professor of economics there. She studied mathematics at the University of Texas at Austin , where she received a bachelor's degree in 1952 and a master's degree in pure mathematics in January 1954 . From 1953 to 1956 she taught at the Radford School for Girls in El Paso and completed a doctorate at Harvard University . In 1965 she earned a Ph.D. from Harvard from Radcliffe College. in mathematics and history of science. The topic of her dissertation, which she wrote with Garrett Birkhoff and I. Bernard Cohen , was Quantity of Structure: Development of Modern Algebraic Concepts from Leibniz to Dedekind . From 1960 to 1963 she was a teaching fellow at Harvard.

From 1963 to 1987 she was Associate Curator and later Curator of the Division of Physical Sciences and Mathematics (later part of the National Museum of American History ) of the Smithsonian Institution . In this function she was responsible for the acquisition of numerous exhibits, including an astrolabe from the 11th century from Moorish Spain, Hermann Hollerith's tabulating machine for the US census in 1890, etc. From 1987 she was director of the LHM Institute in Georgetown (Texas ).

It dealt with the history of mathematics in the 19th and 20th centuries and the history of mathematical instruments and re-edited the standard work on the history of mathematics by Carl Benjamin Boyer . At the time of her death, she was working on a scientific biography about the mathematician Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet . Your collected written estate is held at the University of Texas at Austin.

In her hometown of Georgetown, she was an active member of the local Democratic Party and a longtime member of the American Civil Liberties Union .

Merzbach supervised at least one doctoral student (at the University of Florida 1972).

Fonts

  • with Carl Boyer A history of mathematics , Wiley 2011
  • Georg Scheutz and the first printing calculator , Smithsonian studies in history and technology, No. 36, US Govt. Print. Office 1977
  • Collaboration on Garrett Birkhoff Sourcebook of Classical Analysis , Harvard University Press 1973
  • Collaboration with Peter Duren (editor) A century of Mathematics in America , American Mathematical Society, 3 volumes, 1988, 1989
  • Carl Friedrich Gauss: A Bibliography . Rowman & Littlefield Publishers (March 1, 1984). ISBN 978-0-8420-2169-2 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d life data according to American Men and Women of Science , Thomson Gale 2004.
  2. ↑ Dr. Uta C. Merzbach obituary
  3. ↑ Uta Merzbach in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)Template: MathGenealogyProject / Maintenance / id used
  4. ↑ a b Uta Merzbach papers. Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin, accessed February 12, 2020 .
  5. ↑ a b c d In Memoriam: Uta C. Merzbach. Torch (Smithsonian), accessed February 13, 2020 .
  6. ↑ Information on the person in Richard E. Block u. a. (Eds.): A. Adrian Albert, Collected Mathematical Papers, Volume 1, American Mathematical Society, 1993, p. XVII
  7. ↑ Uta Merzbach in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)Template: MathGenealogyProject / Maintenance / id used
personal data
SURNAME Merzbach, Uta
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Merzbach, Uta Caecilia (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American mathematician historian
DATE OF BIRTH February 9, 1933
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH June 27, 2017
Place of death Georgetown , Texas