Harriet Pollatsek

Harriet Suzanne Katcher Pollatsek (born Harriet Katcher in May 2, 1942 in Detroit, Michigan) is an American mathematician and Professor of Mathematics at Mount Holyoke College.[1]

Education and career

Pollatsek entered the honors program at University of Michigan in 1959, the first person in her family to attend college.[1] She earned a BA in mathematics in 1963 and her PhD in 1967.[2] After graduating she held short-term teaching positions at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, the University of Toledo, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.[3]

Following this, she joined the faculty at Mount Holyoke College in 1970,[3] and earned tenure there in 1974. In 1990 she was named the Julia and Sarah Ann Adams Professor of Science at Mount Holyoke College. She was dean of studies from 1977 to 1980. On sabbatical leaves she has also been a visiting professor at the University of Oregon.

Contributions

She is a researcher in the field of Lie theory and on the application of difference sets to error correcting codes and coding theory.

She is also active in developing new methods of teaching mathematics, particularly in developing a new method of teaching calculus called calculus in context. This method embeds calculus concepts in specific questions from various sciences and then goes to the abstract and generalized concepts. She has worked on summer mathematical research with undergraduates under a grant from the NSF.

References

  1. 1 2 Charlene Morrow and Teri Peri (eds), Notable Women in Mathematics, Greenwood Press, 1998, pp. 164-169.
  2. ↑ Harriet Pollatsek at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  3. 1 2 Speaker bio, Seaway Section of the MAA, Fall 1997, retrieved 2015-02-17.
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