Vera Pless (nee Stepen; March 5, 1931 – March 2, 2020) was an American mathematician who specialized in combinatorics and coding theory. [1] [2] She was professor emerita at the University of Illinois at Chicago. [3]
Vera Pless (nee Stepen; March 5, 1931 – March 2, 2020) was an American mathematician who specialized in combinatorics and coding theory. [1] [2] She was professor emerita at the University of Illinois at Chicago. [3]
Vera Stepen was born on Chicago's west side to a Russian Jewish immigrant family. As a teenager, she was more interested in playing the cello than in mathematics, but she left high school two years early to go to the University of Chicago, and finished her studies there in three years. [2]
Inspired by Irving Kaplansky to study abstract algebra, [4] she stayed at the university for a master's degree, which she earned in 1952 not long after marrying her husband, a high-energy experimental physicist.
She began working in physics at the University of Chicago, but soon won a fellowship to study at Northwestern University. Her husband became a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Pless moved with him to Massachusetts, where she completed her doctorate from Northwestern in 1957 under the supervision of Kaplansky's student Alex F. T. W. Rosenberg, [5] soon before the birth of her first child. [2]
Two years later, bored with being a stay-at-home mother, Pless began teaching courses at Boston University, and a few years later began searching for a full-time job. Unable to obtain an academic position, she took a position at the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratory in Massachusetts. where she began working on error-correcting codes. [2]
During this time she helped to found an organization called Women in Science and Engineering, and at one point was president. [4] She stayed at AFCRL from 1963 until 1972; a regular visitor and inspiration during this time was Harvard mathematician and cryptographer Andrew Gleason. [4] [6]
When the Mansfield amendment banned the military from performing basic research, [4] she moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she worked as a research associate for Project MAC. [1] [2]
She returned to Chicago in 1975 as a full professor of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago. [1] Her husband and youngest son had remained in the Boston area, and five years after the move, she and her husband divorced. [4]
She retired in 2006 [7] and died at her home in Oak Park, Illinois on March 2, 2020 at the age of 88. [3] [8] [9]
In 2012 she became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. [10]
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Introduction to the Theory of Error-Correcting Codes is a textbook on error-correcting codes, by Vera Pless. It was published in 1982 by John Wiley & Sons, with a second edition in 1989 and a third in 1998. The Basic Library List Committee of the Mathematical Association of America has rated the book as essential for inclusion in undergraduate mathematics libraries.
Jennifer Denise Key is a retired South African mathematician whose research has concerned the interconnections between group theory, finite geometry, combinatorial designs, and coding theory. She is a professor emeritus at Clemson University in the US, and an honorary professor at Aberystwyth University in the UK, and the University of KwaZulu-Natal and University of the Western Cape in South Africa.
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