Harriet Suzanne Katcher Pollatsek (born Harriet Katcher, May 2, 1942) is an American mathematician and Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at

Mount Holyoke College Mount Holyoke College is a private liberal arts women's college in South Hadley, Massachusetts. It is the oldest member of the historic Seven Sisters colleges, a group of elite historically women's colleges in the Northeastern United States. ...

.Charlene Morrow and Teri Peri (eds), ''Notable Women in Mathematics'', Greenwood Press, 1998, pp. 164-169.

Education and career

Born to a Jewish family in

Detroit, Michigan Detroit ( , ; , ) is the largest city in the U.S. state of Michigan. It is also the largest U.S. city on the United States–Canada border, and the seat of government of Wayne County. The City of Detroit had a population of 639,111 at ...

, Pollatsek entered the honors program at

University of Michigan , mottoeng = "Arts, Knowledge, Truth" , former_names = Catholepistemiad, or University of Michigania (1817–1821) , budget = $10.3 billion (2021) , endowment = $17 billion (2021)As o ...

in 1959, the first person in her family to attend college. She earned a BA in mathematics in 1963 and her PhD in 1967 under the direction of Jack E. McLaughlin. After graduating she held short-term teaching positions at

Western Michigan University Western Michigan University (Western Michigan, Western or WMU) is a public research university in Kalamazoo, Michigan. It was initially established as Western State Normal School in 1903 by Governor Aaron T. Bliss for the training of teachers ...

Kalamazoo Kalamazoo ( ) is a city in the southwest region of the U.S. state of Michigan. It is the county seat of Kalamazoo County. At the 2010 census, Kalamazoo had a population of 74,262. Kalamazoo is the major city of the Kalamazoo-Portage Metropolit ...

, the

University of Toledo The University of Toledo (UToledo or UT) is a public research university in Toledo, Ohio. It is the northernmost campus of the University System of Ohio. The university also operates a Health Science campus, which includes the University of T ...

, and the

University of Massachusetts Amherst The University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst, UMass) is a public research university in Amherst, Massachusetts and the sole public land-grant university in Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Founded in 1863 as an agricultural college, it ...

.Speaker bio
Seaway Section of the MAA, Fall 1997, retrieved 2015-02-17. Following this, she joined the faculty at Mount Holyoke College in 1970, and earned tenure there in 1974. In 1990 she was named the Julia and Sarah Ann Adams Professor of Science at Mount Holyoke College. She was dean of studies from 1977 to 1980. On sabbatical leaves, she has also been a visiting professor at the University of Oregon.

Contributions and honors

Pollatsek's research interests include

finite group Finite is the opposite of infinite. It may refer to: * Finite number (disambiguation) * Finite set, a set whose cardinality (number of elements) is some natural number * Finite verb, a verb form that has a subject, usually being inflected or marked ...

s, finite geometries, Lie theory,

difference set In combinatorics, a (v,k,\lambda) difference set is a subset D of size k of a group G of order v such that every nonidentity element of G can be expressed as a product d_1d_2^ of elements of D in exactly \lambda ways. A difference set D is said ...

s and their application to

error correcting codes In computing, telecommunication, information theory, and coding theory, an error correction code, sometimes error correcting code, (ECC) is used for controlling errors in data over unreliable or noisy communication channels. The central idea is ...

and coding theory. With Emily H. Moore, she is the author of the book ''Difference Sets: Connecting Algebra, Combinatorics, and Geometry'' (Student Mathematical Library 67, American Mathematical Society, 2013).Review of ''Difference Sets''
Mark Hunacek, ''MAA Reviews'', October 2013. She has been active in developing new methods of teaching mathematics, particularly in developing a new method of teaching calculus called calculus in context. This method embeds calculus concepts in specific questions from various sciences and then goes to the abstract and generalized concepts. She has worked on summer mathematical research with undergraduates under the

NSF NSF may stand for: Political organizations *National Socialist Front, a Swedish National Socialist party *NS-Frauenschaft, the women's wing of the former German Nazi party *National Students Federation, a leftist Pakistani students' political gr ...

program

Research Experiences for Undergraduates Research Experiences for Undergraduates (or REUs) are competitive summer research programs in the United States for undergraduates studying science, engineering, or mathematics. The programs are sponsored by the National Science Foundation, and a ...

. In 2007 Pollatsek was presented with the Mount Holyoke College Faculty Prize for Teaching.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Pollatsek, Harriet 1942 births Living people 20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians University of Michigan College of Literature, Science, and the Arts alumni Mount Holyoke College faculty People from Detroit 20th-century American women mathematicians 21st-century American women mathematicians