Sheila Scott Macintyre

Sheila Scott Macintyre nèe Sheila Scott (1910 - 1960) Scottish mathematician best known for her work on the Whittaker constant.

Born of the rector of Trinity Academy and a housewife, young Sheila studied at the Edinburgh Ladies’ College, where she was acknowledged as the best student in mathematics and in general. She continued at the University of Edinburgh and published her first paper in 1935. Professor Edmund Whittaker introduced Scott to Archibald Macintyre, a professor from Aberdeen who had earned a doctorate at Cambridge. The two married in 1940 and the next year she began teaching at Aberdeen, filling in for faculty serving in the war. While pregnant with her second child, Sheila Macintyre stopped teaching but continued work on a thesis. In 1952, she co-authored with her husband a paper on “Theorems on the convergence and asymptotic validity of Abel’s series” in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh Section A; two years later Archibald published with Erdős a paper on integral functions in another Scottish journal, giving her Erdős number (http://planetmath.org/ErdHosNumber) 2. In 1958, the Macintyres moved with their children to Cleveland, and both taught at the University of Cincinnati.