Mary Boas. [View all]

[NNadir]

So I went to my kid's Masters graduation ceremony this weekend and I got to thinking it's probably been a long time since he took a formal math class. He took four semesters of Calculus in high school; the last one, vector calculus not for college credit, and repeated the course in his Freshman year of college.

So I'm thinking to myself, "Self, that kid needs some review and reference for his Ph.D program."

I had a nice book on partial differential equations for physics somewhere around here, but I can't find it. It's been many years since I last saw it; maybe someone borrowed it and never brought it back.

So I decided to buy a nice math review/reference book as a gift. A kind of general reference for this sort of thing - the reviews are mixed from "Love it!" to "Hate it" - is Erwin Kreyszig's Advanced Engineering Mathematics, 10th Edition.

Since there were a subset of people who whined about this book - it's apparently utilized in upper division undergraduate courses - I asked myself, "Self, what else is out there?"

Well, there's Mary Boas's Mathematical Methods in the Physical Sciences

It's an old book, but a lot of people still like it, apparently. Dr. Boas died in 2010, after having retired from DePaul in 1987. The book dates from the 1960s.

She was a pioneer as this blurb from DePaul indicates: Women’s History at DePaul

An excerpt:

Women’s achievements in American history can be celebrated while simultaneously highlighting the established gender roles of a particular era. A newly-acquired book held in DePaul Special Collections and Archives showcases some of women’s groundbreaking successes. After the War: Women in Physics in the United States shares the stories of women who continued to work in the male-dominated physics field even after men returned stateside as veterans and reentered the workplace following World War II. The new book by Ruth H. Howes and Caroline Herzenberg celebrates important women in physics during this time and the various “strategies they used to survive as physicists.”

Former DePaul faculty member Dr. Mary Boas, one of the featured physicists in the book, was born in Washington state and received both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Washington. Boas’ husband Ralph taught mathematics at numerous universities, including Harvard, MIT, and Northwestern. Mary received her PhD in physics from MIT in 1948. After the family moved to the Chicago area in the 1950s, Mary Boas took a teaching position at DePaul University in 1958...

I'll probably end up buying the Kreyszig book in ebook form, but it was nice to come across a pioneering woman scientist, even if, as the article states, she had to put up with "Puff pieces" about her life.