Name Doris Schattschneider | ||
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Books MC Escher kaleidocycles, Visions of symmetry, MC Escher: Visions of, A Companion to Calculus | ||
Doris J. Schattschneider (née Wood) is an American mathematician, a retired professor of mathematics at Moravian College. She is known for writing about tessellations and about the art of M. C. Escher, for helping Martin Gardner validate and popularize the pentagon tiling discoveries of amateur mathematician Marjorie Rice, and for leading the project that developed The Geometer's Sketchpad.
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Biography
Schattschneider was born in Staten Island; her mother, Charlotte Lucille Ingalls Wood, taught Latin and was herself the daughter of a Staten Island school principal, and her father, Robert W. Wood, Jr., worked as a bridge engineer for New York City. Her family moved to Lake Placid, New York during World War II, while her father served as an engineer for the U. S. Army; she began her schooling in Lake Placid, but returned to Staten Island after the war. She did her undergraduate studies in mathematics at the University of Rochester, and earned a Ph.D. in 1966 from Yale University under the joint supervision of Tsuneo Tamagawa and Ichirô Satake; her thesis, in abstract algebra, concerned semisimple algebraic groups. She taught at Northwestern University and the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle before joining the faculty of Moravian College in 1968, where she remained for 34 years until her retirement. She was the first female editor of Mathematics Magazine, from 1981 to 1985.
Awards and honors
Schattschneider won the Mathematical Association of America's Carl B. Allendoerfer Award for excellence in expository writing in Mathematics Magazine in 1979, for her article "Tiling the plane with congruent pentagons". In 1993, she won the MAA's Award for Distinguished Teaching of College or University Mathematics. In 2012 she became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.