Please join HOM SIGMAA on Tuesday, February 21st at 4 PM pacific/7 PM eastern on Zoom for a talk by Marjorie Senechal (Smith College) on "Josephine Mehlberg (1905 - 1969), Mathematician".
Zoom link: https://pitzer.zoom.us/j/89782901915
Meeting ID: 897 8290 1915
Abstract:
Professor Mehlberg was known by different names in different phases of her life:
Pepi Spinner in her childhood and youth in Eastern Poland
Józefa Mehlberg after marrying her fellow student Henryk Mehlberg in 1933
Countess Janina Suchodolska , her nom de guerre in World War II
Josephine Janina Spinner Mehlberg in the United States after 1956.
In their forthcoming book,* Counterfeit Countess: The Jewish Mathematician Who Rescued Poles During the Holocaust, Elizabeth B. White, senior historian at the U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and Joanna Sliwa, historian of the Holocaust and Polish Jewish history, reveal her heroic wartime activities and set them in their cultural and historical contexts.
But who was Professor Mehlberg the mathematician? This talk complements Counterfeit Countess. It's also a tribute to the kind and generous person who was my teacher and my friend.
- Counterfeit Countess will be published by Simon and Schuster in early 2024.
Speaker Biography:
Marjorie Senechal is Louise Wolff Kahn professor emerita in mathematics and history of science and technology at Smith College, past editor-in-chief of theMathematical Intelligencer, and an inaugural fellow of the American Mathematical Society. Her research fields are mathematical crystallography and discrete geometry, and the history of both. Her books include Quasicrystals and Geometry, Shaping Space, and a biography, I Died for Beauty: Dorothy Wrinch and the Cultures of Science.