Ellen Fetter

Fetter was born to Frank Fetter and Elizabeth Garrett Pollard.[1] Her mother created an endowment for chamber music at Swarthmore College, which has been supported by successive generations of her family.[2] Fetter attended the Ecole Préalpina in Chexbres, Switzerland[3] and New Trier High School, from which she graduated in 1957.[4] She studied mathematics at Mount Holyoke College and graduated in 1961.[5]

In 1961, Fetter interviewed with a member of the team who used a LGP-30 in MIT's Department of Nuclear Engineering, who recommended her to Margaret Hamilton.[6] Hamilton soon moved on to another project, and Fetter took over the computational work for Edward Lorenz's research, plotting the motion of a particle experiencing fast convection in an idealised beaker.[6] The work was the foundation of chaos theory.[6] Fetter’s contribution was acknowledged by Lorenz ‘Special thanks are due to Miss Ellen Fetter for handling the many numerical computations’ in his frequently referenced paper. [7]

In 1963, Fetter married John Gille, who was studying geophysics at MIT.[3] They moved to Florida State University, where she worked on programming for several years.[6] In the 1970s, she and her husband moved to Colorado, where Gille is now a senior scientist emeritus at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.[8] Fetter took computer science classes at the University of Colorado Boulder, but soon left to work in tax preparation.[6]

Fetter's daughter, Sarah Gille, studied physics at Yale University. She now works in physical oceanography at the University of California, San Diego.[9]