Martha Siegel

Martha Jochnowitz Siegel is an American applied mathematician, probability theorist and mathematics educator who served as the editor of Mathematics Magazine from 1991 to 1996.[1][2] In 2017 she won the Yueh-Gin Gung and Dr. Charles Y. Hu Award for Distinguished Service of the Mathematical Association of America for "her remarkable leadership in guiding the national conversation on undergraduate mathematics curriculum".[1][3] She was a faculty member in the mathematics department of Towson University from 1971 until 2015, when she became a professor emerita.[1]

This article is about the mathematician. For the spammer, see Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel.

Education and career

Siegel grew up in Brooklyn, the daughter of civil engineer Nat Jochnowitz.[3] She became interested in mathematics through her father's interest in mathematical puzzles,[2] and through the calculation of baseball statistics for the Brooklyn Dodgers.[3] She did her undergraduate studies in mathematics at Russell Sage College, a small women's college in Troy, New York, while also taking classes at the nearby men-only Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute,[4] as at that time Russell Sage had no mathematics department.[2] At Russell Sage, she was a Kellas honor student, and president of the science club.[5] She completed her Ph.D. in 1969 at the University of Rochester; her dissertation, On Birth and Death Processes, was supervised by Johannes Kemperman.[4][6] During graduate school and until her 1971 move to Towson, she was on the faculty at Goucher College.[4]

Contributions

At Towson, in 1981, Siegel founded an innovative and still-ongoing undergraduate applied mathematics program involving projects connected to local business and government. She is a co-author of the discrete mathematics and precalculus textbooks Finite Mathematics and Its Applications and Functioning in the Real World. She also served as chair of a committee of the Mathematical Association of America charged with producing the 2015 edition of their MAA Curriculum Guide to Undergraduate Majors in the Mathematical Sciences.[3]

References
  1. Bradshaw, Megan, "FCSM's Siegel honored for service to mathematics", 2016 News, Towson University, retrieved 2018-02-07
  2. Ross, Kenneth A. (August 10, 2006), Martha Siegel (interview) (PDF), Mathematical Association of America
  3. Crannell, Annalisa; Ensley, Doug (March 2017), "Yueh-Gin Gung and Dr. Charles Y. Hu Award for 2017 to Martha Siegel for Distinguished Service to Mathematics", American Mathematical Monthly, 124 (3): 195–197, doi:10.4169/amer.math.monthly.124.3.195
  4. Martha J. Siegel, Ph.D., Professor Emerita, Department of Mathematics, Towson University, retrieved 2018-02-07
  5. "Arrives home" (PDF), The Dobbs Ferry Register, p. 7, June 4, 1959
  6. Martha Siegel at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
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