Death Notices

On September 20, 2002 Elizabeth Stafford Hirschfelder [PhD 1930, M. Ingraham] died at the age of 100. Betty, as she was affectionately known, received B.A. and M.A. degrees from the Women's College of Brown University, now Pembroke College, in 1923 and 1924. There were three PhD graduates in mathematics in 1930 when she received her PhD from the University of Wisconsin, and these were the 18th, 19th, and 20th Wisconsin PhD degrees in mathematics, whose number is now nearing 1000. Betty participated in the Wisconsin Mathematics PhD Centennial in 1997 and was the earliest Wisconsin PhD present at the celebration, having held her Wisconsin PhD for 67 years at that time. The title of Dr.  Hirschfelder's thesis was ``Matrices conjugate to a given matrix with respect to its minimum equation.'' She taught mathematics at Wisconsin for almost 20 years. With her first husband, Ivan Sokolnikoff, she co-authored in 1934 the important textbook ``Higher Mathematics for Engineers and Physicists.'' In 1997 she started the Elizabeth S. Hirschfelder Fund for Graduate Women in Mathematics, Chemistry, and Physics at the UW-Foundation.

Alan Schwartz [PhD 1968, W. Rudin] died on January 2, 2003. Alan was a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Missouri, St. Louis. He took an early retirement last year because of a long illness and moved to Washington, D.C. to be near his children and grandchildren. Alan's thesis at Wisconsin was titled ``Local properties of Hankel Transforms.'' He was the author or coauthor of approximately 50 papers.

Herman F. Karreman died on January 9, 1999 in Dodgeville Wisconsin. Professor Karreman joined the Mathematics Research Center in 1963. He was a tenured member of both the School of Business and the Department of Electrical Engineering, teaching courses in operations research and mathematical analysis. Dr. Karreman was born in 1913 in the Netherlands and served in the Dutch Armed Forces in Indonesia during World War II. He and his family were held in several prison camps for three and a half years. After the war he resumed his studies and received a doctorate in 1949 in econometrics from the University of Rotterdam. In 1960 he received the Lanchester Prize (an annual award for the best contribution to operations research and the management sciences published in English) for his paper ``Programming the supply of a strategic material - Party I. A nonstochastic model,'' Naval Research Logistics Quarterly, 7 (1960), 261-279.

Etta Falconer, Professor of Mathematics at Spelman College, died on September 19, 2002. Professor Falconer held an undergraduate degree in mathematics from UW-Madison and was awarded an honorary doctorate by our university in 1996. She spent 37 years at Spelman where she was Associate Provost for Science Programs and Policy, and Fuller E. Calloway Professor of Mathematics. In 1995 the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) awarded Dr. Falconer their Louise Hay Award for Contributions to Mathematics Education. In 2002 Professor Falconer received the AAAS Mentor Award for Lifetime Achievement.