Jane Dewey
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Jane Mary Dewey (July 11, 1900 – September 19, 1976) was an American physicist.


Early life and education

Jane Mary Dewey was born in Chicago, the daughter (and sixth child) of philosopher
John Dewey John Dewey (; October 20, 1859 – June 1, 1952) was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer whose ideas have been influential in education and social reform. He was one of the most prominent American scholars in the f ...
and educator Alice Chipman Dewey. Her parents named her in honor of Jane Addams, an activist, sociologist and reformer; and
Mary Rozet Smith Mary Rozet Smith (December 23, 1868 – February 22, 1934) was a Chicago-born US philanthropist who was one of the trustees and benefactors of Hull House. She was the partner of activist Jane Addams for over thirty years. Smith provided the finan ...
, a philanthropist who was Addams's longtime companion. She was educated at the
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and then the Spence School, after which she attended Barnard College, graduating in 1922. She moved from New York to New England for graduate studies, earning a PhD in Physical Chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1925.


Career

After graduating from MIT, Dewey worked for two years researching in the newly emergent field of quantum mechanics with
Nobelist The Nobel Prizes ( sv, Nobelpriset, no, Nobelprisen) are awarded annually by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Swedish Academy, the Karolinska Institutet, and the Norwegian Nobel Committee to individuals and organizations who make out ...
Niels Bohr and future-Nobelist Werner Heisenberg as a postdoctoral researcher in Copenhagen. She then moved to Princeton University, where she worked with Karl Taylor Compton with support from a National Research Council fellowship. In 1929, she became a faculty member at the University of Rochester, nominally under the geology department but in fact at the university's Institute of Applied Optics. Dewey left Rochester for Bryn Mawr College, where she became an assistant professor in 1931. That year, she was elected a Fellow of the
American Physical Society The American Physical Society (APS) is a not-for-profit membership organization of professionals in physics and related disciplines, comprising nearly fifty divisions, sections, and other units. Its mission is the advancement and diffusion of k ...
, and she soon took on the position of department chair. However, her marriage — to fellow physicist J. Alston Clark — broke apart, and her health worsened, forcing her to take medical leave. During her absence, Bryn Mawr replaced her as chair with a male physics professor (
Walter C. Michels Walter C. Michels (1906–1975) was an Emeritus Professor of Physics at Bryn Mawr College. He was chairman of the department of physics at Bryn Mawr from 1936 to 1970. He was named emeritus professor in 1972. Early life and education Michels grew ...
), and Dewey was unemployed until 1940, when she found a part-time instructor position at
Hunter College Hunter College is a public university in New York City. It is one of the constituent colleges of the City University of New York and offers studies in more than one hundred undergraduate and postgraduate fields across five schools. It also admi ...
. Her health suddenly restored, she moved to industry, taking a wartime job at the United States Rubber Company and then, in 1947, a staff position at the Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory (BRL) at Aberdeen Proving Ground, where she headed the Terminal Ballistics Laboratory.


Legacy


Dewey-Mackenzie estimate

In a landmark paper, while at United States Rubber Company, Dewey derived the elastic constants of a solid material filled with non-rigid particles. In 1950, Mackenzie presented a similar derivation for a solid containing spherical holes. They both made the assumption that the distribution of the inclusions is diffuse enough that neighboring inclusions do not affect one another. This has led to similar derivations using this assumption being called "Dewey-Mackenzie estimates." Mackenzie’s solution may be considered a special case of the more general and difficult problem that Dewey set herself and succeeded in solving exactly. As of 2021, her paper has been cited over 130 times in scientific journals. In fact, the approach in her original paper is now so well known that it is often referred to only indirectly, as a "Dewey-Mackenzie estimate," without citation.


Slade-Dewey equation

While at BRL, one of her contributions to ballistic science has come to be known as the Slade-Dewey equation,W.H. Andersen & N.A. Louie, “Projectile Impact Ignition Characteristics of Propellants I. Deflagrating Composite Explosive,” ''Combustion Science and Technology'', 20(3-4):153-160, 1979. which empirically relates the critical impact velocity ''Vt'' for initiating detonation of a solid secondary explosive or
propellant A propellant (or propellent) is a mass that is expelled or expanded in such a way as to create a thrust or other motive force in accordance with Newton's third law of motion, and "propel" a vehicle, projectile, or fluid payload. In vehicles, the e ...
to the diameter ''d'' of an impacting projectile, V_t = A / \sqrt + B, where ''A'' and ''B'' are empirical constants that depend on the explosive.


Selected publications

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References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Dewey, Jane Barnard College alumni Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni Bryn Mawr College faculty University of Rochester faculty Fellows of the American Physical Society 20th-century American physicists American women physicists American women academics 20th-century American women scientists 1900 births 1976 deaths