Joanne Elliott

Joanne Elliott (December 5, 1925 – March 5, 2023) was an American mathematician who specialized in potential theory,[1] who was described as a "disciple" of her co-author, probability theorist William Feller.[2] She was also a professor of mathematics at Rutgers University.[1]

Early life and education

Elliott was born on December 5, 1925, in Providence, Rhode Island,[3] and graduated from Brown University in 1947.[3] She completed her Ph.D. at Cornell University in 1950, as part of a handful of "outstanding graduate students" working at Cornell in the post-World-War-II decade.[4] Her dissertation, On Some Singular Integral Equations of the Cauchy Type, was supervised by Harry Pollard.[5]

Career and later life

After a year at Swarthmore College, she worked at Mount Holyoke College as an assistant professor from 1952 until 1956, when she moved to Barnard College.[6] In 1958, she was the supervisor of Doris Stockton's doctorate at Brown University.[7] In 1961, as an associate professor at Barnard, she was funded by the National Science Foundation to visit the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey for postdoctoral research.[8] She also worked at the Institute for Defense Analyses in Princeton in the early 1960s.[2]

She came to Rutgers University in 1964, at a time when Rutgers had a much higher number of female faculty than many mathematics departments then or later.[9] Among her graduate students at Rutgers was Edward R. Dougherty, later a distinguished professor of electrical engineering at Texas A&M University.[5] She chaired the Rutgers mathematics department from 1974 to 1977.[9] Elliott retired from Rutgers in 1991, in a year in which the university was cutting costs by offering early retirement to its employees.[9]

Elliott died in Titusville, New Jersey on March 5, 2023, at the age of 97.[10]

References

1. Research Areas by Faculty, Rutgers Mathematics Department, retrieved 2019-09-07
2. Halmos, Paul R. (1999), "Joanne Elliott", I Have a Photographic Memory, American Mathematical Society, p. 128, ISBN 9780821886090
3. Murray, Margaret A. M. (July 23, 2017), "Joanne Elliott, Cornell 1950", Women Becoming Mathematicians: American women mathematics PhDs 1940-1959, retrieved 2019-09-07
4. Mathematics at Cornell: 150 years in a nutshell, Cornell University Mathematics Department
5. Joanne Elliott at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
6. Women in Rutgers Mathematics, Rutgers Mathematics Department, retrieved 2019-09-07
7. Ph.D. Alumni, Brown University Mathematics Department, retrieved 2019-09-07
8. "News and Notices", The American Mathematical Monthly, 68 (10): 1021–1030, December 1961, doi:10.1080/00029890.1961.11989810
9. Weibel, Charles (1995), A History of Mathematics at Rutgers, Rutgers Mathematics Department, retrieved 2019-09-07
10. "Joanne Elliott", The Mather-Hodge Funeral Home, retrieved 2023-05-01