Dona Anschel Papert Strauss (born April 1934) is a South African mathematician working in

topology Topology (from the Greek language, Greek words , and ) is the branch of mathematics concerned with the properties of a Mathematical object, geometric object that are preserved under Continuous function, continuous Deformation theory, deformat ...

and

functional analysis Functional analysis is a branch of mathematical analysis, the core of which is formed by the study of vector spaces endowed with some kind of limit-related structure (for example, Inner product space#Definition, inner product, Norm (mathematics ...

. Her doctoral thesis was one of the initial sources of

pointless topology In mathematics, pointless topology, also called point-free topology (or pointfree topology) or topology without points and locale theory, is an approach to topology that avoids mentioning point (mathematics), points, and in which the Lattice (order ...

. She has also been active in the political left, lost one of her faculty positions over her protests of the

Vietnam War The Vietnam War (1 November 1955 – 30 April 1975) was an armed conflict in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia fought between North Vietnam (Democratic Republic of Vietnam) and South Vietnam (Republic of Vietnam) and their allies. North Vietnam w ...

, and became a founder of European Women in Mathematics. Mathematician Neil Hindman, with whom Strauss wrote a book on the

Stone–Čech compactification In the mathematical discipline of general topology, Stone–Čech compactification (or Čech–Stone compactification) is a technique for constructing a Universal property, universal map from a topological space ''X'' to a Compact space, compact Ha ...

of topological semigroups, has stated the following as advice for other mathematicians: "Find someone who is smarter than you are and get them to put your name on their papers", writing that for him, that someone was Dona Strauss.

Education and career

Strauss is originally from

South Africa South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa (RSA), is the Southern Africa, southernmost country in Africa. Its Provinces of South Africa, nine provinces are bounded to the south by of coastline that stretches along the Atlantic O ...

, the descendant of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Her father was a physicist at the

University of Cape Town The University of Cape Town (UCT) (, ) is a public university, public research university in Cape Town, South Africa. Established in 1829 as the South African College, it was granted full university status in 1918, making it the oldest univer ...

. She grew up in the

Eastern Cape The Eastern Cape ( ; ) is one of the nine provinces of South Africa. Its capital is Bhisho, and its largest city is Gqeberha (Port Elizabeth). Due to its climate and nineteenth-century towns, it is a common location for tourists. It is also kno ...

, and earned a master's degree in mathematics at the University of Cape Town. She completed her Ph.D. at the

University of Cambridge The University of Cambridge is a Public university, public collegiate university, collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209, the University of Cambridge is the List of oldest universities in continuous operation, wo ...

in 1958. Her dissertation, ''Lattices of Functions, Measures, and Open Sets'', was supervised by Frank Smithies. After completing her doctorate, she took a faculty position at the

University of London The University of London (UoL; abbreviated as Lond or more rarely Londin in Post-nominal letters, post-nominals) is a collegiate university, federal Public university, public research university located in London, England, United Kingdom. The ...

. Following her husband's dream of living on a farm in Vermont, she moved to

Dartmouth College Dartmouth College ( ) is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Hanover, New Hampshire, United States. Established in 1769 by Eleazar Wheelock, Dartmouth is one of the nine colonial colleges chartered before the America ...

in 1966. By 1972, she was working at the

University of Hull The University of Hull is a public research university in Kingston upon Hull, a city in the East Riding of Yorkshire, England. It was founded in 1927 as University College Hull. The main university campus is located in Hull and is home to the Hu ...

and circa 2008 she became a professor at the

University of Leeds The University of Leeds is a public research university in Leeds, West Yorkshire, England. It was established in 1874 as the Yorkshire College of Science. In 1884, it merged with the Leeds School of Medicine (established 1831) and was renamed Y ...

. After retiring, she has been listed by Leeds as an honorary visiting fellow.

Activism

In South Africa, Strauss developed a strong antipathy to racial discrimination from a combination of being a Jew at the time of the Holocaust and her own observations of South African society. At the University of Cape Town, she became a member of the Non-European Unity Movement. After completing her degree, she left the country in protest over

apartheid Apartheid ( , especially South African English: , ; , ) was a system of institutionalised racial segregation that existed in South Africa and South West Africa (now Namibia) from 1948 to the early 1990s. It was characterised by an ...

; her parents also left South Africa, after her father's retirement, for Israel. In the 1950s, she regularly published editorial works in '' Socialist Review'', and in the 1960s she was active in Solidarity (UK). As an assistant professor at

in 1969, Strauss took part in a student

anti-war An anti-war movement is a social movement in opposition to one or more nations' decision to start or carry on an armed conflict. The term ''anti-war'' can also refer to pacifism, which is the opposition to all use of military force during conf ...

protest that occupied Parkhurst Hall, the building that housed the college administration. In response, Dartmouth announced that Strauss and another faculty protester would not have their contracts renewed, and that they would be suspended from the faculty and "denied all rights and privileges of membership on the Dartmouth faculty", the first time in the college's history that it had taken this step. In 1986, Strauss became one of the five founders of European Women in Mathematics, together with

Bodil Branner Bodil Branner (born 5 February 1943, in Aarhus) is a retired Danish mathematician, one of the founders of European Women in Mathematics and a former chair of the Danish Mathematical Society. Her research concerned holomorphic dynamics and the h ...

Caroline Series Caroline Mary Series (born 24 March 1951) is an English mathematician known for her work in hyperbolic geometry, Kleinian groups and dynamical systems. Early life and education Series was born on March 24, 1951, in Oxford to Annette and Georg ...

, Gudrun Kalmbach, and

Marie-Françoise Roy Marie-Françoise Roy (born 28 April 1950 in Paris) is a French mathematician noted for her work in real algebraic geometry. She has been Professor of Mathematics at the University of Rennes 1 since 1985 and in 2009 was made a ''Chevalier'' of th ...

Books

Strauss is the co-author of: *''Algebra in the Stone-Čech compactification: Theory and applications'' (with Neil Hindman, De Gruyter Expositions in Mathematics 27, Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1998; 2nd ed., 2012) *''Banach algebras on semigroups and on their compactifications'' (with H. Garth Dales and Anthony T.-M. Lau, Memoirs of the American Mathematical Society 205, 2010) *''Banach spaces of continuous functions as dual spaces'' (with H. Garth Dales, Frederick K. Dashiell Jr., and Anthony T.-M. Lau, CMS Books in Mathematics, Springer, 2016)

Recognition

In 2009 the University of Cambridge hosted a meeting, "Algebra and Analysis around the Stone-Cech Compactification", in honour of Strauss's 75th birthday.

Personal life

Strauss married (as the first of his four wives)

Seymour Papert Seymour Aubrey Papert (; 29 February 1928 – 31 July 2016) was a South African-born American mathematician, computer scientist, and educator, who spent most of his career teaching and researching at MIT. He was one of the pioneers of artif ...

. Papert was also South African, and became a co-author and fellow student of Frank Smithies with Strauss at Cambridge. She met her second husband, Edmond Strauss, at the University of London. She is a strong amateur chess player, and was director of the Brighton and Hove Progressive Synagogue for 2014–2015.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Strauss, Dona 1934 births Living people South African mathematicians South African Jews British women mathematicians 20th-century women mathematicians Functional analysts University of Cape Town alumni Alumni of the University of Cambridge Academics of the University of London Dartmouth College faculty Academics of the University of Hull Academics of the University of Leeds 21st-century British mathematicians 21st-century women mathematicians 20th-century South African mathematicians South African emigrants to the United Kingdom 21st-century South African mathematicians 20th-century British mathematicians Topologists