Ellen Fetter
Ellen Cole Fetter | |
|---|---|
| Alma mater | New Trier High School Mount Holyoke College |
| Known for | Chaos theory |
| Scientific career | |
| Institutions | Massachusetts Institute of Technology Florida State University |
Ellen Cole Fetter Gille is an American computer scientist. She worked with Edward Norton Lorenz on chaos theory.
Early life and education
[edit]Fetter was born to Frank Whitson Fetter and Elizabeth Garrett Pollard.[1] Her mother created an endowment for chamber music at Swarthmore College, which has been supported by successive generations of her family.[2] Fetter attended the Ecole Préalpina in Chexbres, Switzerland[3] and New Trier High School, from which she graduated in 1957.[4] She studied mathematics at Mount Holyoke College and graduated in 1961.[5]
Career
[edit]In 1961, Fetter interviewed with a member of the team who used a LGP-30 in MIT's Department of Nuclear Engineering, who recommended her to Margaret Hamilton.[6] Hamilton soon moved on to another project, and Fetter took over the computational work for Edward Lorenz's research, plotting the motion of a particle experiencing fast convection in an idealised beaker.[6] The work was the foundation of chaos theory.[6] Fetter's contribution was acknowledged by Lorenz ‘Special thanks are due to Miss Ellen Fetter for handling the many numerical computations’ in his frequently referenced paper.[7]
In 1963, Fetter married John Gille, who was studying geophysics at MIT.[3] They moved to Florida State University, where she worked on programming for several years.[6] In the 1970s, she and her husband moved to Colorado, where Gille is now a senior scientist emeritus at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.[8] Fetter took computer science classes at the University of Colorado Boulder, but soon left to work in tax preparation.[6]
Fetter's daughter, Sarah Gille, studied physics at Yale University. She now works in physical oceanography at the University of California, San Diego.[9][10]
References
[edit]- ^ "Deaths" (PDF). Friends Journal. 1992. Retrieved 2019-05-24.
- ^ dpulley1. "Fetter Chamber Group Gives Back | Music and Dance". Retrieved 2019-05-24.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link) - ^ a b "John Gille to Wed Miss Ellen Fetter". The New York Times. 1963-07-14. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2019-05-24.
- ^ "New Trier Class of 1957". newtrier57.org. Retrieved 2019-05-24.
- ^ College, Mount Holyoke. "Honor Roll". blog.mtholyoke.edu. Archived from the original on 2019-05-24. Retrieved 2019-05-24.
- ^ a b c d e Sokol, Joshua (20 May 2019). "The Hidden Heroines of Chaos". Quanta Magazine. Archived from the original on 21 January 2022. Retrieved 2019-05-24.
- ^ Lorenz, Edward N. (1963-03-01). "Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow". Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences. 20 (2): 130–141. Bibcode:1963JAtS...20..130L. doi:10.1175/1520-0469(1963)020<0130:DNF>2.0.CO;2. ISSN 0022-4928.
- ^ "John Gille | staff.ucar.edu". staff.ucar.edu. Retrieved 2019-05-28.
- ^ "Sarah Gille". Archived from the original on 2019-01-31. Retrieved 2019-07-01.
- ^ "Sarah Gille". Archived from the original on 2023-12-01. Retrieved 2024-02-08.