Person: Hay, Louise Schmir

Louise Szmir Hay was a French-born American mathematician who worked on recursively enumerable sets and computational complexity theory.

The reader may well ask at this point - who is Louise Szmir?
Is this not a biography of Louise Schmir Hay?
However, she was not known by the name of Larson, all her mathematical publications being under the name of Louise Hay.
Money was still tight while at College but Louise was able to earn money during the summer vacation, and again the Westinghouse prize helped her to find useful summer jobs.
At Cornell Hay's thesis was supervised by J Barkley Rosser.
Being apart again did not really seem an option to Hay who terminated her studies at Cornell early, writing up what she had at that point for a Master's Degree.
Hay was awarded an M.A. in 1959, then also managed to get a job at Oberlin.
It was not that good a programme, for Hay found a counter-example to one of the results she had been told to prove.
In 1968 she was appointed as an Associate Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and in the same year her marriage with John Hay ended.
Hay spent the rest of her career in Chicago at the University of Illinois.
We still have to give a brief account of some of Hay's mathematics.
From 1980 until 1988 Hay became Head of the Mathematics Department.
The annual presentation of this award is intended to highlight the importance of mathematics education and to evoke the memory of all that Hay exemplified as a teacher, scholar, administrator, and human being.

Born 14 June 1935, Metz, France. Died 28 October 1989, Oak Park, Illinois, USA.

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Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0!

O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive