Dona Anschel Papert Strauss is a South African mathematician working in topology and functional analysis. Her doctoral thesis was one of the initial sources of pointless topology. She has also been active in the political left, lost one of her faculty positions over her protests of the Vietnam War, and became a founder of European Women in Mathematics. Mathematician Neil Hindman, with whom Strauss wrote a book on the Stone–Čech compactification of topological semigroups, has stated the following as advice for other mathematicians: "Find someone who is smarter than you are and get them to put your name on their papers", writing that for him, that someone was Dona Strauss.
In South Africa, Strauss developed a strong antipathy to racial discrimination from a combination of being a Jew at the time of the Holocaust and her own observations of South African society. At the University of Cape Town, she became a member of the Non-European Unity Movement. After completing her degree, she left the country in protest over apartheid; her parents also left South Africa, after her father's retirement, for Israel. In the 1950s, she regularly published editorial works in Socialist Review, and in the 1960s she was active in Solidarity. As an assistant professor at Dartmouth College in 1969, Strauss took part in a student anti-war protest that occupied Parkhurst Hall, the building that housed the college administration. In response, Dartmouth announced that Strauss and another faculty protester would not have their contracts renewed, and that they would be suspended from the faculty and "denied all rights and privileges of membership on the Dartmouth faculty", the first time in the college's history that it had taken this step. In 1986, Strauss became one of the five founders of European Women in Mathematics, together with Bodil Branner, Caroline Series, Gudrun Kalmbach, and Marie-Françoise Roy.
Books
Strauss is the co-author of:
Algebra in the Stone-Čech compactification: Theory and applications
Banach algebras on semigroups and on their compactifications
In 2009 the University of Cambridge hosted a meeting, "Algebra and Analysis around the Stone-Cech Compactification", in honour of Strauss's 75th birthday.
Personal life
Strauss married Seymour Papert. Papert was also South African, and became a co-author and fellow student of Frank Smithies with Strauss at Cambridge. She met her second husband, Edmond Strauss, at the University of London. She is a strong amateur chess player, and was director of the Brighton and Hove Progressive Synagogue for 2014–2015.
