From Notices of the AMS
Deborah Loewenberg Ball: Teaching/Learning Mathematics Teaching
by Hyman Bass
Communicated by William McCallum
To its credit, Notices has been publishing a series of profiles celebrating the work and careers of several accomplished women in mathematics. Deborah Loewenberg Ball might, at first consideration, seem an unlikely entry into that august company, in that neither her education nor her early life interests exhibited particular mathematical inclinations. Indeed, her first serious engagement with a challenging math problem came after she had graduated college, where she had majored in French. How she addressed that problem is an important part of her story. I write from the perspective of a colleague, friend, and collaborator.
1. Family and Early Education
Let's start from the beginning.
Deborah's family heritage is part of a long line of German Jewish intellectuals. Those who survived Nazi persecution fled to the United States and other countries. Her great-great-uncle, Ernst Cassirer, was a prominent twentieth-century philosopher, who embraced both sides of the Neo-Kantian division between the natural and the human sciences, a sensibility also present in Deborah's work.
- Also in Notices
- The Unfailing Optimism of Dr. Gloria Ford Gilmer (1928-2021)
- The Contributions of Chuu-Lian Terng to Geometry
