Person: Pless, Vera

Vera Pless was an American mathematician who specialized in combinatorics and coding theory.

He saw that she had a real mathematical talent but Vera was not at this stage interested in mathematics.
Vera continued her studies at the University of Chicago working for her Master's degree.
Pless was awarded her doctorate in 1957.
In this paper Pless looks at dual vector spaces of countable dimension over a division ring and studies the ring LLL of all continuous linear transformations on such a space.
Once her youngest boy Ben was old enough to begin primary school, Pless began to look for full-time posts.
The result, based on the MacWilliams' identities, is used to determine the complete weight distributions of several quadratic residue codes.
Carrying out basic research in the Department of Defense establishments was banned by the United States government and in 1972 Pless left and for three years she worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a research associate before being appointed a full professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1975.
This is one of about 100 publications which Pless has up to the present time.

Born 5 March 1931, Chicago, Illinois, USA. Died 2 March 2020, Oak Park, Illinois, United States.

View full biography at MacTutor

Origin Usa, Women

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

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