Marion Walter

Marion Walter (July 30, 1928 – May 9, 2021) was an internationally-known mathematics educator and professor of mathematics at the University of Oregon in Eugene, Oregon.

There is a theorem named after her, called Marion Walter's Theorem or just Marion's Theorem as it is affectionately known.

Marion Walter was born in Berlin, Germany in 1928 to Erna and Willy Walter.

Her father was a prosperous merchant who specialized in costume jewelry.

The book Education towards spiritual resistance: The Jewish Landschulheim Herrlingen, 1933 to 1939 by Lucie Schachne documents this remarkable school, which was closed in 1939.

In 1936, when the Nazis were gaining strength in Germany and it was no longer possible for Jews to attend public school, she and her sister, Ellen, were sent to a Jewish boarding school called Landschulheim Herrlingen in the village of Herrlingen, a suburb of Ulm.

On March 15, 1939, Marion and Ellen Walter were sent on a Kindertransport to England, where they attended a Church of England boarding school in Eastbourne, on the southeastern coast of England.

Marion and Ellen Walter were reunited with their parents in England.

After England entered World War II, in 1940 her father was sent to internment on the Isle of Man.

He died there in 1943.

Eastbourne was in the path of a possible German invasion of England and all students at the boarding school were evacuated.

Walter was sent to a school in the hamlet of Wykey in Shropshire, which was in a large country house where they bred cocker spaniels.

She slept on an air mattress in a white-washed kennel.

She was moved two more times.

The last place she resided in was Combermere Abbey in Cheshire, which was acquired by Sir Kenneth Crossley.

After Walter completed her schooling at the age of sixteen in December 1944, the school's only mathematics teacher resigned.

Since it was difficult to find a replacement during the war period, Walter was asked to teach math, in part because she had earned a mark of distinction on her Cambridge University School Certificate exam.

She taught for two terms and found she enjoyed teaching.

Walter attended college in England for two years before leaving for the United States in 1948 with her mother and sister.

The family arrived in New York City in January 1948.

She then attended Hunter College, majoring in mathematics and minoring in education, graduating with a B.A. in 1950.

Ellen Walter returned to England to get married.

After graduating from Hunter, Walter taught at Hunter College High School and George Washington High School.

In the summers of 1952 and 1953, Walter was awarded a National Bureau of Standards summer scholarship to study at the Institute of Numerical Analysis at UCLA.

The main purpose of the Institute, sponsored by the National Bureau of Standards and funded by the Office of Naval Research, was to work towards the further development of high-speed automatic digital computing machinery.

The senior staff at the Institute included D.H. Lehmer (director), Mark Kac, Irving Kaplansky, and A Adrian Albert.

During the second summer at the institute, she met Olga Taussky-Todd who became her mentor and encouraged her to complete her master's degree.

Marshall Hall Jr. joined the senior staff of the Institute in 1953.

Walter took many photographs of prominent mathematicians during her summers at the Institute.

These photographs are now part of the Marion Walter Collection at the Archives of American Mathematics on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin.

Walter took evening classes for a master's degree in mathematics at New York University.

In order to support herself during this time, she worked as a research assistant, mainly doing computing work at what became the Courant Institute.

She earned her M.S. in mathematics from New York University in 1954.

In 1954, Walter accepted a teaching assistantship in the mathematics department at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York; she remained at Cornell until 1956.

In 1956, she took a one-year appointment at Simmons College in Boston, Massachusetts; she ended up staying at Simmons for nine years.

Back in 1956, the college did not have a major in mathematics or a formal math department.

Walter created both the math major and the mathematics department at Simmons.

She stepped down as department chair after four years, remaining there teaching until 1965 when she left to concentrate on her doctorate at Harvard Graduate School of Education.

She retained close relationships with her students from Simmons over the years; several of the first math majors stayed in touch with her until her death.

One of those students was Lenore Blum, who was a distinguished career professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University.