Sheila Scott Macintyre

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Sheila Scott Macintyre (nèe Sheila Scott, April 23, 1910 - March 21, 1960) was a Scottish mathematician well known for her work on the Whittaker constant. Macintyre is also well known for creating a multilingual scientific dictionary: written in English, German, and Russian; at the time of her death, she was working on Japanese.

[edit] Biography

Born of the rector of Trinity Academy and a housewife, young Sheila studied at the Edinburgh Ladies' College (1926-28), where she was acknowledged as the best student in mathematics and in general. She continued at the University of Edinburgh, graduating in 1932, and published her first paper, on the asymptotic periods of integral functions, in 1935. She also studied at Girton College.

Professor Edmund Whittaker introduced Scott to Archibald James Macintyre, a professor from the University of Aberdeen who had earned a doctorate at Cambridge University. The two married in 1940 and the couple had two children: Alister William Macintyre and Susan Cantey. In 1941 Scott Macintyre began teaching at Aberdeen, filling in for faculty serving in the war. While pregnant with her second child, Sheila Macintyre stopped teaching but continued work on a thesis on Some problems in interpolatory function theory and received her PhD from Aberdeen in 1947.

In 1958, the Macintyres moved with their children to Cleveland, and both taught at the University of Cincinnati. Also in 1958, she became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

[edit] References

F. D. Fasanelli, Sheila Scott Macintyre in Louise S. Grinstein (Editor), Paul J. Campbell (Editor) (1987). Women of Mathematics: A Bio-Bibliographic Sourcebook. Greenwood Press, New York. ISBN 978-0313248498. pp. 140-143

This article incorporates material from Sheila Scott Macintyre on PlanetMath, which is licensed under the GFDL.