Dorothy Lewis Bernstein
| Dorothy Lewis Bernstein | |
|---|---|
Dorothy Lewis Bernstein
|
|
| Born |
April 11, 1914 Chicago, Illinois, US |
| Died | February 5, 1988 (aged 73) Providence, Rhode Island, US |
| Nationality | American |
| Fields | Applied mathematics |
| Institutions |
Mount Holyoke College University of Wisconsin at Madison University of Rochester Goucher College |
| Alma mater |
University of Wisconsin at Madison Brown University |
| Doctoral advisor | Jacob Tamarkin |
Dorothy Lewis Bernstein (April 11, 1914 – February 5, 1988) was an American mathematician known for her work in applied mathematics, statistics, computer programming, and her research on the Laplace transform. She was the first woman to be elected president of the Mathematics Association of America.
Dorothy Bernstein was born in Chicago, the daughter of Jewish Russian immigrants Jacob and Tille Lewis Bernstein. While her parents had no formal education, they encouraged all of their children to seek education; all five earned either a PhD or MD.
Bernstein attended North Division High School (Milwaukee) in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In 1930 she attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison and where she held a University Scholarship (1933–1934) and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. In 1934 she graduated with both a B.A degree, summa cum laude, and a M.A. Degree in Mathematics. She did her master's thesis research on finding complex roots of polynomials by an extension of Newton's method. In 1935 she attended Brown University, where she became a member of the scientific society Sigma Xi. She received her Ph.D. in mathematics from Brown in 1939, while simultaneously holding a teaching position at Mount Holyoke College. Her dissertation was entitled "The Double Laplace Integral" and was published in the Duke Mathematical Journal.
From 1943–1959 Bernstein taught at the University of Rochester, where she worked on existence theorems for partial differential equations. Her work was motivated by non-linear problems that were just being tackled by high-speed digital computers. In 1950, Princeton University Press published her book, Existence Theorems in Partial Differential Equations.
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