Lillian Rosanoff Lieber


Lillian Rosanoff Lieber was a Russian-American mathematician and popular author. She often teamed up with her illustrator husband, Hugh Gray Lieber, to produce works.

Life and career

Early life and education

Lieber was one of four children of Abraham H. and Clara Rosanoff. Her brothers were Denver publisher Joseph Rosenberg, psychiatrist Aaron Rosanoff, and chemist Martin André Rosanoff. Aaron and Martin changed their names to sound more Russian, less Jewish. Lieber moved to the US with her family in 1891. She received her A.B. from Barnard College in 1908, her M.A. from Columbia University in 1911, and her Ph.D. from Clark University in 1914, under Martin's direction; at Clark, Solomon Lefschetz was a classmate. She married Hugh Gray Lieber on October 27, 1926.

Career

After teaching at Hunter College from 1908 to 1910, and in the New York City high school system, she became a Research Fellow at Bryn Mawr College from 1915 to 1917; she then went on to teach at Wells College from 1917 to 1918 as Instructor of Physics, and at the Connecticut College for Women. She joined the mathematics department at Long Island University in Brooklyn, New York in 1934, became department chair in 1945, and was made a full professor in 1947, until her retirement in 1954; she was appointed director of LIU's Galois Institute of Mathematics in 1934. Over her career she published some 17 books, which were written in a unique, free-verse style and illustrated with whimsical line drawings by her husband. Her highly accessible writings were praised by no less than Albert Einstein, Cassius Jackson Keyser, Eric Temple Bell, and S. I. Hayakawa. Concerning her book, The Education of T. C. MITS, Dorothy Canfield Fisher said:

"This is quite different from any other book you ever bought... full of mathematics and full of humor... also full of a deep, healing philosophy of life, reassuring, strengthening, humane..."


She edited several volumes of Galois lectures, including Martin's A Practical Simplification of the Method of Least Squares, several talks by Alonzo Church, and Lattice Theory by Garrett Birkhoff.
Although Lieber retired from Long Island University in 1954, she continued to write and publish into the 1960s.

Personal obscurity

Few details of Lillian Lieber's life and career have survived, even at Long Island University. She died in Queens, New York just weeks shy of her 100th birthday. She came from a well-educated Jewish family. Details can be found in the out of print book, Yesterday, that was written by her cousin Miriam Shomer Zunser in the 1930s.

Unusual typography

In addition to enlivening her books with illustrations by her husband, Hugh Gray Lieber, Lillian often chose an unusual scheme of typography which is self-explained in this example from her Preface to The Education of T. C. MITS:

This is not intended to be
free verse.
Writing each phrase on a separate line
facilitates rapid reading,
and everyone
is in a hurry
nowadays.


T.C. MITS was an acronym for "The Celebrated Man In The Street," a character who, like George Gamow's Mr Tompkins, served as a device for bringing concepts in higher mathematics and physics to the general public. The MITS character was central to Lieber's populist approach to education, and she often laced her expositions with passages extolling the virtues of the democratic system.

"The Lillian Lieber Standard"

In her book, The Einstein Theory of Relativity, Lillian Lieber stated her views on the inclusion of mathematics in books intended for "the celebrated man in the streets:"

"...just enough mathematics to HELP and NOT to HINDER the lay reader... Many 'popular' discussions of Relativity without any math at all have been written, but we doubt whether even the best of these can possibly give to a novice an adequate idea of what it is all about.... On the other hand, there are many that are accessible to experts only."


The Cavendish Press in Ann Arbor, Michigan, has adopted Lillian's rule of thumb with some elaboration.

Works

Although her works were broadly influential, they remained out of print for decades. Starting in 2007, publisher has reissued The Education of T.C. MITS, Infinity, and The Einstein Theory of Relativity.