Charlotte Froese Fischer

Born on 21 September 1929 in Ukraine, Charlotte Froese Fischer is an applied mathematician and computer scientist known for developing the multiconfigurational Hartree–Fock (MCHF) method for atoms. Shortly after she was born, her family fled Ukraine and spent several months in a German refugee camp before immigrating to Canada. There Froese Fischer excelled at school and was awarded a scholarship to attend the University of British Columbia. After earning her BA in mathematics and chemistry in 1952 and her MA in applied mathematics in 1954, she spent two years at Cambridge University, studying applied mathematics and computing under English mathematician Douglas Hartree. Upon completion of her PhD in 1957, Froese Fischer was offered a position as lecturer at the University of British Columbia, which had just acquired its first computer. Over the next decade, she added computer courses to the university’s curriculum and then helped form the computer science department. Her research focused on numerical methods, particularly for atomic structure calculations. In 1963 Froese Fischer became the first woman scientist awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation research fellowship, which provides funding for promising early-career scientists. In 1991 she was made a fellow of the American Physical Society. Froese Fischer has been an emerita research professor of computer science at Vanderbilt since 1996. (Photo credit: Michel R. Godefroid, Brussels, Belgium)

Date in History: 21 September 1929