Marjorie Senechal

Senechal was born in St. Louis, Missouri, the oldest of four children of Abraham Wikler, a United States Public Health Service physician. The family soon moved to Lexington, Kentucky, and Senechal grew up as a "narco brat" on the grounds of the Lexington Narcotic Hospital, a prison farm for drug addicts, where her father was associate director.{{citation|title=Dr. Marjorie Senechal: What do Silk, Crystals, Culture, and History Have in Common?|first=Sarah|last=Budrus|series=AWM Essay Contest College First Place Winner|year=2007|publisher=Association for Women in Mathematics|url=http://www.awm-math.org/biographies/contest/SarahBudrus2007.html|access-date=2013-07-16|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160303233404/http://www.awm-math.org/biographies/contest/SarahBudrus2007.html|archive-date=2016-03-03|url-status=dead}}.{{citation|title=All Roads Lead to Lexington: The Consolidation of Addiction Research in the U.S. Public Health Service|url=http://sitemaker.umich.edu/substance.abuse.history/pathway_2|archive-url=https://archive.today/20130717085818/http://sitemaker.umich.edu/substance.abuse.history/pathway_2|url-status=dead|archive-date=2013-07-17|access-date=2013-07-16|publisher=University of Michigan Substance Abuse Research Center}}. She was educated at the Training School of the University of Kentucky, a small school with only one class in each grade; Senechal later wrote that the school's too-easy classwork, snobbish classmates, and anti-Jewish discrimination made her miserable.{{citation|contribution=Narco Brat|first=Marjorie|last=Senechal|title=Of Human Bondage|editor-first=D.|editor-last=Patey|editor-link=Douglas Lane Patey|series=Smith College Studies in History|volume=52|publisher=Smith College|year=2003|url=http://wikler.net/marjoriesenechal/images/NarcoBrat.pdf|access-date=2013-07-17|archive-date=2016-03-03|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160303211435/http://wikler.net/marjoriesenechal/images/NarcoBrat.pdf|url-status=dead}}

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.{{citation|last=Brunner|first=Regina Baron|contribution=Marjorie Wikler Senechal|title=Notable Women in Mathematics: A Biographical Dictionary|editor1-first=Charlene|editor1-last=Morrow|editor2-first=Teri|editor2-last=Perl|publisher=Greenwood Press|year=1998|pages=225–229|isbn=9780313291319|contribution-url=https://archive.org/details/notablewomeninma00morr/page/225|contribution-url-access=limited}}. 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. Nevertheless, she finished her Ph.D. in 1965, under the supervision of Abe Sklar; her thesis concerned functional equations.{{mathgenealogy|id=27139}}

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. She eventually divorced Senechal, and married photographer Stan Sherer in 1989. 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.{{citation|url=http://www.smith.edu/news/2006-07/DeliciousRivers.html|title=Musical Play Toys with Rhythm, Order, Pattern, Sound|journal=Smith College News & Events|date=October 26, 2006}}.{{citation|title=Festival of surprise: Smith event to connect math and art|url=http://www.smithsophian.com/news/festival-of-surprise-smith-event-to-connect-math-and-art-1.2266864|journal=The Sophian|first=Alexandra|last=Neale|date=October 26, 2006}}.{{citation|title=Theatre Review, Delicious Rivers: A Post Office With Attitude|journal=New York Times|date=January 24, 2006|first=Anne|last=Midgette|url=http://theater.nytimes.com/2006/01/24/theater/reviews/24mama.html?_r=0}}

Senechal won the Mathematical Association of America's Carl B. Allendoerfer Award for excellence in expository writing in Mathematics Magazine in 1982, for her article, "Which Tetrahedra Fill Space?"{{citation|url=http://www.maa.org/awards/allendoerfer.html|title=The Mathematical Association of America's Carl B. Allendoerfer Award|access-date=2013-07-13|archive-date=1999-09-09|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/19990909235834/http://www.maa.org/awards/allendoerfer.html|url-status=dead}}. In 2008, her book American Silk 1830 – 1930 won the Millia Davenport Publication Award of the Costume Society of America.[http://www.costumesocietyamerica.com/grantsawards/milliadavenport.html Millia Davenport Publication Award] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090919170049/http://www.costumesocietyamerica.com/GrantsAwards/milliadavenport.html |date=2009-09-19 }}, Costume Society of America, retrieved 2013-07-15. In 2012, she became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.[https://www.ams.org/profession/fellows-list List of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society], retrieved 2013-07-15.

• Crystalline Symmetries: An informal mathematical introduction {{ISBN|978-0-7503-0041-4}} (Alan Hilger, 1990)Review of Crystalline Symmetries by Doris Schattschneider (1993), SIAM Review 35 (2): 335–336, {{doi|10.1137/1035079}}.Review of Crystalline Symmetries by R. L. E. Schwarzenberger (1992), {{MR|1100479}}.
• Quasicrystals and Geometry {{ISBN|978-0-521-37259-6}} (Cambridge University Press, 1995)Review of Quasicrystals and Geometry by István Hargittai (1997), Advanced Materials 9 (12): 994–996, {{doi|10.1002/adma.19970091217}}.Review of Quasicrystals and Geometry by Richard Kenyon (1996), {{MR|1340198}}.[https://www.ams.org/notices/199604/radin.pdf Review of Quasicrystals and Geometry] by Charles Radin (1996), Notices of the AMS 43 (4): 416–421.
• Long Life to Your Children! A portrait of High Albania {{ISBN|978-1-55849-097-0}} (with photographer S. Sherer, University of Massachusetts Press, 1997){{citation|title=Art: Life in Albania Captured in Photographs|journal=New York Times|first=Vivien|last=Raynor|date=September 13, 1998|url=https://www.nytimes.com/1998/09/13/nyregion/art-life-in-albania-captured-in-photographs.html}}.
• Northampton's Century of Silk {{ISBN|978-0-9600828-3-4}} (City of Northampton, Massachusetts, 2004)Northampton's Century of Silk was produced as part of a year-long city celebration of silk, co-organized by Senechal; see {{citation|title=Town spins yearlong celebration of almost forgotten silk industry|journal=Toledo Blade|date=January 19, 2003|url=https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=h0pPAAAAIBAJ&pg=6658,1069425}}.
• American Silk 1830 – 1930: Entrepreneurs and Artifacts {{ISBN|978-0-89672-589-8}} (with Jacqueline Field and Madelyn Shaw, Texas Tech University Press, 2007)Review of American Silk by Laurence F. Gross (2008), Technology and Culture 49 (3): 796–798, {{doi|10.1353/tech.0.0050}}.Review of American Silk by Carolyn C. Cooper (2009), Journal of Interdisciplinary History 39 (3): 450–452, {{doi|10.1162/jinh.2009.39.3.450}}.Review of American Silk by Melinda Talbot Nasardinov (2008), Winterthur Portfolio 42 (4): 293–294, {{doi|10.1086/592797}}.Review of American Silk by Marla Miller (2008), The New England Quarterly 81 (1): 165–168, {{JSTOR|20474621}}.
• I Died For Beauty: Dorothy Wrinch and the Cultures of Science {{ISBN|978-0-19-973259-3}} (Oxford University Press, 2012){{citation|url=http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?id=1491|journal=Los Angeles Review of Books|title=Forgetting Dorothy Wrinch: Science and the Culture of Correctness|date=March 16, 2013|first=Boer|last=Deng|access-date=July 16, 2013|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130323030554/http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?id=1491|archive-date=March 23, 2013|url-status=dead}}. See also a [http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?id=1579&fulltext=1 follow-up exchange of letters] {{Webarchive|url=https://archive.today/20130717085843/http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?id=1579&fulltext=1 |date=2013-07-17 }} between Senechal and Deng.{{citation|title=X-Ray crystallography: Symmetry wars|first=Philip|last=Ball|author-link=Philip Ball|journal=Nature|volume=492|pages=37–38|date=6 December 2012|issue=7427|doi=10.1038/492037a|bibcode=2012Natur.492...37B|doi-access=free}}.{{citation|title=Author Margorie Senechal resurrects a brilliant female scientist|journal=Maclean's|first=Katie|last=Engelhart|url=http://www.macleans.ca/2013/04/10/author-margorie-senechal-resurrects-a-brilliant-female-scientist/|date=April 10, 2013|access-date=July 16, 2013}}.{{citation|title=CultureLab: A mathematician's magnificent failure to explain life|journal=New Scientist|date=7 December 2012|first=Liz|last=Else|url=https://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2012/12/a-mathematicians-magnificent-failure-to-explain-life.html}}.

{{reflist|30em}}

• [http://www.math.smith.edu/~senechal/ Home page]

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Category:1939 births

Category:Living people

Category:Scientists from St. Louis

Category:Mathematicians from Missouri

Category:American historians of science

Category:American people of Ukrainian-Jewish descent

Category:Jewish American historians

Category:Fellows of the American Mathematical Society

Category:Illinois Institute of Technology alumni

Category:University of Chicago alumni

Category:Smith College faculty

Category:20th-century American mathematicians

Category:20th-century American women mathematicians

Category:21st-century American mathematicians

Category:21st-century American women mathematicians