Marian Pour-El
American mathematical logician
Marian Boykan Pour-El (April 29, 1928 – June 10, 2009) was an American mathematical logician who did pioneering work in computable analysis.
Early life and education
Marian Boykan was born in 1928 in New York City; her parents were dentist Joseph Boykan and his wife Matilda (Mattie, née Caspe), a former laboratory technician and housewife.
As a young girl, she performed ballet at the Metropolitan Opera House,
and this influenced her later life where she was often more comfortable speaking before large audiences than in small groups.
Although she wanted to attend the Bronx High School of Science, it was at that time only for boys; instead, she went to a girls' school, Hunter College High School.
Her parents were unwilling to pay the tuition for private college for her, so she went to Hunter College, an inexpensive local higher-education establishment primarily aimed at training schoolteachers. There she earned a bachelor's degree in physics in 1949. She also completed enough courses in mathematics for a second major but was not allowed to have two majors by Hunter College's rules.
She was accepted to Harvard University for graduate studies in mathematics, with full support, as the only woman in the program.
At Harvard, she earned a master's degree in 1951 and a Ph.D. in mathematical logic in 1958. She was very isolated and lonely at Harvard, with few friends and, initially, no other students even willing to sit next to her in her classes.
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This entry incorporates text from “Marian Pour-El” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.