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]
^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.
^
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.