Margaret Alice Waugh Maxfield (February 23, 1926 – December 20, 2016) was an American mathematician and mathematics book author.

Education and personal life

Margaret Waugh was born on February 23, 1926, in

Willimantic, Connecticut Willimantic is a city located in the town of Windham in Windham County, Connecticut, United States. It is a former Census-designated place and borough, and is currently organized as one of two tax districts within the Town of Windham. Known as " ...

. Her father was agricultural economist Frederick V. Waugh and her grandfather was horticulturist

Frank Albert Waugh Frank Albert Waugh (July 8, 1869 – March 20, 1943) was an American landscape architect whose career focused upon recreational uses of national forests, the production of a highly natural style of landscape design, and the implementation of ecolo ...

. She was active in the mathematics club at Oberlin College in the mid-1940s, and graduated from Oberlin in 1947. After earning a master's degree in 1948 from the

University of Wisconsin A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United States, ...

, she completed her Ph.D. in 1951 at the

University of Oregon The University of Oregon (UO, U of O or Oregon) is a public research university in Eugene, Oregon. Founded in 1876, the institution is well known for its strong ties to the sports apparel and marketing firm Nike, Inc, and its co-founder, billion ...

. Her dissertation, ''Fermat's Theorem for Matrices over a Modular Ring'', was supervised by Ivan M. Niven. In 1948 she had married John Edward Maxfield, another student at Wisconsin and the University of Oregon who became her frequent collaborator. As students, both Maxfields visited the Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, then known as the Naval Ordnance Test Station, in the summers. After completing their doctorates they worked at the station from 1951 until 1960, when John Maxfield took a succession of academic posts at the

University of Florida The University of Florida (Florida or UF) is a public land-grant research university in Gainesville, Florida. It is a senior member of the State University System of Florida, traces its origins to 1853, and has operated continuously on its ...

, Kansas State University, and (beginning in 1981) at

Louisiana Tech University Louisiana Tech University (Louisiana Tech, La. Tech, or simply Tech) is a public research university in Ruston, Louisiana. It is part of the University of Louisiana System and classified among "R2: Doctoral Universities – High research acti ...

. Margaret, also, became a professor of business at Kansas State, and a professor of mathematics and statistics at Louisiana Tech. By 2011 Maxfield had retired, but was still active in mathematics, and noted to her alumni magazine that she was using Wikipedia to find bibliographic material for her papers. She died on December 20, 2016, in

Placerville, California Placerville (, ; formerly Old Dry Diggings, Dry Diggings, and Hangtown) is a city in and the county seat of El Dorado County, California. The population was 10,747 as of the 2020 census, up from 10,389 as of the 2010 census. It is part of the Sa ...

Contributions

While at the Naval Ordnance Test Station, Maxfield coauthored the book ''Statistics Manual: With Examples Taken from Ordnance Development'', with Edwin L. Crow and Frances A. Davis. It was published by the station in 1955, and reprinted by Dover Books in 1960. With John Maxfield, she was also the coauthor of ''Contemporary Mathematics for General Education: Algebra'' (Allyn and Bacon, 1963, also with S. Gould Sadler) ''Abstract Algebra and Solution By Radicals'' (W. B. Saunders, 1971; reprinted by Dover Books, 1992), ''Discovering Number Theory'' (W. B. Saunders, 1972), and ''Keys to Mathematics'' (W. B. Saunders, 1973) Maxfield was one of the 1968 winners of the

Lester R. Ford Award Lester is an ancient Anglo-Saxon surname and given name. Notable people and characters with the name include: People Given name * Lester Bangs (1948–1982), American music critic * Lester W. Bentley (1908–1972), American artist from Wisc ...

of the Mathematical Association of America for a paper with her father on the rational approximation of

square root In mathematics, a square root of a number is a number such that ; in other words, a number whose ''square'' (the result of multiplying the number by itself, or  ⋅ ) is . For example, 4 and −4 are square roots of 16, because . ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Maxfield, Margaret 1926 births 2016 deaths People from Willimantic, Connecticut 20th-century American mathematicians American women mathematicians Oberlin College alumni University of Wisconsin–Madison alumni University of Oregon alumni Kansas State University faculty Louisiana Tech University faculty 20th-century American women 21st-century American women