Beatrice Aitchison

Beatrice Aitchison (July 18, 1908 – September 22, 1997) was an American mathematician, statistician, and transportation economist who directed the Transport Economics Division of the United States Department of Commerce, and later became the top woman in the United States Postal Service and the first policy-level appointee there.

Aitchison's mother was a musician and her father, Clyde Bruce Aitchison, was a lawyer and economist who served on the Interstate Commerce Commission. She was born on July 18, 1908, in Portland, Oregon; she lived in Portland until 1916 and then in Washington, DC for the rest of her childhood, attending Central High School there. She earned a bachelor's degree from Goucher College in 1928.

After working for a year as an actuary in New York City, she began graduate studies at Johns Hopkins University in mathematics, completing her Ph.D. in 1933. Her dissertation, supervised by Gordon Thomas Whyburn, was entitled On Mapping with Functions of Finite Sections, and concerned point-set topology; she also published two papers in the same area.

Because of the Great Depression, employment as a mathematician was hard to find: she applied to 145 schools but was only able to find a one-semester temporary position, substituting for a sick instructor at the University of Richmond's Westhampton College for Women. Following this, she worked from 1934 to 1935 at as a lecturer in statistics at American University in Washington, DC.

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