Dona Anschel Papert Strauss (born April 1934) is a South African mathematician working in

topology In mathematics, topology (from the Greek words , and ) is concerned with the properties of a geometric object that are preserved under continuous deformations, such as stretching, twisting, crumpling, and bending; that is, without closing ho ...

and

functional analysis Functional analysis is a branch of mathematical analysis, the core of which is formed by the study of vector spaces endowed with some kind of limit-related structure (e.g. inner product, norm, topology, etc.) and the linear functions defined ...

. Her doctoral thesis was one of the initial sources of

pointless topology In mathematics, pointless topology, also called point-free topology (or pointfree topology) and locale theory, is an approach to topology that avoids mentioning points, and in which the lattices of open sets are the primitive notions. In this app ...

. She has also been active in the political left, lost one of her faculty positions over her protests of the

Vietnam War The Vietnam War (also known by #Names, other names) was a conflict in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. It was the second of the Indochina Wars and was officially fought between North Vie ...

, and became a founder of European Women in Mathematics. Mathematician Neil Hindman, with whom Strauss wrote a book on the

Stone–Čech compactification In the mathematical discipline of general topology, Stone–Čech compactification (or Čech–Stone compactification) is a technique for constructing a universal map from a topological space ''X'' to a compact Hausdorff space ''βX''. The Sto ...

topological semigroup In mathematics Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in mode ...

s, has stated the following as advice for other mathematicians: "Find someone who is smarter than you are and get them to put your name on their papers", writing that for him, that someone was Dona Strauss.

Education and career

Strauss is originally from

South Africa South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa (RSA), is the southernmost country in Africa. It is bounded to the south by of coastline that stretch along the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans; to the north by the neighbouring count ...

, the descendant of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Her father was a physicist at the

University of Cape Town The University of Cape Town (UCT) ( af, Universiteit van Kaapstad, xh, Yunibesithi ya yaseKapa) is a public research university in Cape Town, South Africa. Established in 1829 as the South African College, it was granted full university statu ...

. She grew up in the Eastern Cape, and earned a master's degree in mathematics at the University of Cape Town. She completed her Ph.D. at the

University of Cambridge , mottoeng = Literal: From here, light and sacred draughts. Non literal: From this place, we gain enlightenment and precious knowledge. , established = , other_name = The Chancellor, Masters and Schola ...

in 1958. Her dissertation, ''Lattices of Functions, Measures, and Open Sets'', was supervised by Frank Smithies. After completing her doctorate, she took a faculty position at the

University of London The University of London (UoL; abbreviated as Lond or more rarely Londin in post-nominals) is a federal public research university located in London, England, United Kingdom. The university was established by royal charter in 1836 as a degre ...

. Following her husband's dream of living on a farm in Vermont, she moved to

Dartmouth College Dartmouth College (; ) is a private research university in Hanover, New Hampshire. Established in 1769 by Eleazar Wheelock, it is one of the nine colonial colleges chartered before the American Revolution. Although founded to educate Native ...

in 1966. By 1972, she was working at the

University of Hull , mottoeng = Bearing the Torch f learning, established = 1927 – University College Hull1954 – university status , type = Public , endowment = £18.8 million (2016) , budget = £190 millio ...

and circa 2008 she became a professor at the

University of Leeds , mottoeng = And knowledge will be increased , established = 1831 – Leeds School of Medicine1874 – Yorkshire College of Science1884 - Yorkshire College1887 – affiliated to the federal Victoria University1904 – University of Leeds , ...

. After retiring, she has been listed by Leeds as an honorary visiting fellow.

Activism

In South Africa, Strauss developed a strong antipathy to racial discrimination from a combination of being a Jew at the time of the Holocaust and her own observations of South African society. At the University of Cape Town, she became a member of the Non-European Unity Movement. After completing her degree, she left the country in protest over

apartheid Apartheid (, especially South African English: , ; , "aparthood") was a system of institutionalised racial segregation that existed in South Africa and South West Africa (now Namibia) from 1948 to the early 1990s. Apartheid was ...

; her parents also left South Africa, after her father's retirement, for Israel. In the 1950s, she regularly published editorial works in '' Socialist Review'', and in the 1960s she was active in Solidarity (UK). As an assistant professor at

in 1969, Strauss took part in a student

anti-war An anti-war movement (also ''antiwar'') is a social movement, usually in opposition to a particular nation's decision to start or carry on an armed conflict, unconditional of a maybe-existing just cause. The term anti-war can also refer to pa ...

protest that occupied Parkhurst Hall, the building that housed the college administration. In response, Dartmouth announced that Strauss and another faculty protester would not have their contracts renewed, and that they would be suspended from the faculty and "denied all rights and privileges of membership on the Dartmouth faculty", the first time in the college's history that it had taken this step. In 1986, Strauss became one of the five founders of European Women in Mathematics, together with Bodil Branner,

Caroline Series Caroline Mary Series (born 24 March 1951) is an English mathematician known for her work in hyperbolic geometry, Kleinian groups and dynamical systems. Early life and education Series was born on 24 March 1951 in Oxford to Annette and Georg ...

, Gudrun Kalmbach, and Marie-Françoise Roy.

Books

Strauss is the co-author of: *''Algebra in the Stone-Čech compactification: Theory and applications'' (with Neil Hindman, De Gruyter Expositions in Mathematics 27, Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1998; 2nd ed., 2012) *''Banach algebras on semigroups and on their compactifications'' (with H. Garth Dales and Anthony T.-M. Lau, Memoirs of the American Mathematical Society 205, 2010) *''Banach spaces of continuous functions as dual spaces'' (with H. Garth Dales, Frederick K. Dashiell Jr., and Anthony T.-M. Lau, CMS Books in Mathematics, Springer, 2016)

Recognition

In 2009 the University of Cambridge hosted a meeting, "Algebra and Analysis around the Stone-Cech Compactification", in honour of Strauss's 75th birthday.

Personal life

Strauss married (as the first of his four wives)

Seymour Papert Seymour Aubrey Papert (; 29 February 1928 – 31 July 2016) was a South African-born American mathematician, computer scientist, and educator, who spent most of his career teaching and researching at MIT. He was one of the pioneers of artifici ...

. Papert was also South African, and became a co-author and fellow student of Frank Smithies with Strauss at Cambridge. She met her second husband, Edmond Strauss, at the University of London. She is a strong amateur chess player, and was director of the Brighton and Hove Progressive Synagogue for 2014–2015.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Strauss, Dona 1934 births Living people South African mathematicians South African Jews British women mathematicians 20th-century women mathematicians Functional analysts University of Cape Town alumni Alumni of the University of Cambridge Academics of the University of London Dartmouth College faculty Academics of the University of Hull Academics of the University of Leeds 21st-century British mathematicians 21st-century women mathematicians 20th-century South African mathematicians South African emigrants to the United Kingdom 21st-century South African mathematicians 20th-century British mathematicians Topologists