Marjorie Lee Senechal (née Wikler, born 1939) is an American mathematician and historian of science, the Louise Wolff Kahn Professor Emerita in Mathematics and History of Science and Technology at Smith College[1] and editor-in-chief of The Mathematical Intelligencer.[2] In mathematics, she is known for her work on tessellations and quasicrystals; she has also studied ancient Parthianelectric batteries[3] and published several books about silk.[4]
She left Lafayette High School after the 11th grade to begin her undergraduate studies as a pre-med at the University of Chicago, but soon switched to mathematics, graduating in 1960.[8] While doing graduate studies at the Illinois Institute of Technology, she married mathematician Lester Senechal, and moved to Arizona with him before completing her own degree.[8] Nevertheless, she finished her Ph.D. in 1965, under the supervision of Abe Sklar; her thesis concerned functional equations.[9]
Unable to get her own faculty position at Arizona because of the anti-nepotism rules then in place, she and her husband visited Brazil, supported by a Fulbright Scholarship. They then moved to Massachusetts, where she took the faculty position at Smith that she would keep for the rest of her career.[5] She eventually divorced Senechal, and married photographer Stan Sherer in 1989.[8] She retired in 2007; a festival in 2006 honoring her impending retirement included the performance of a musical play that she wrote with The Talking Band member Ellen Maddow, loosely centered around the theme of aperiodic tilings and the life of amateur mathematician Robert Ammann.[10][11][12]
American Silk 1830 – 1930: Entrepreneurs and ArtifactsISBN978-0-89672-589-8 (with Jacqueline Field and Madelyn Shaw, Texas Tech University Press, 2007)[14][23][24][25][26]
^As well as the two books written by Senechal listed in the Books section, she edited and contributed to Silk Unraveled!: Threads of Human History, Smith College Studies in History 53, 2005.
^Senechal, Marjorie (2003), "Narco Brat", in Patey, D. (ed.), Of Human Bondage(PDF), Smith College Studies in History, vol. 52, Smith College, archived from the original(PDF) on 2016-03-03, retrieved 2013-07-17
^ abcdBrunner, Regina Baron (1998), "Marjorie Wikler Senechal", in Morrow, Charlene; Perl, Teri (eds.), Notable Women in Mathematics: A Biographical Dictionary, Greenwood Press, pp. 225–229, ISBN9780313291319.