Jessie MacWilliams

Florence Jessie MacWilliams Collinson ( * 1917 in Stoke -on-Trent; † 27 May 1990) was a British- American mathematician who worked in coding theory.

MacWilliams studied at Cambridge University, where she received her bachelor's degree in 1938 and 1939, her master's degree. Then she went with a scholarship to Johns Hopkins University, where she studied with Oscar Zariski, which they followed to Harvard in 1940. In 1941, she married, raised her three children and worked from 1958 as a programmer at Bell Laboratories, where her husband Walter MacWilliams worked as an engineer. To become a scientist at Bell Labs, she received her PhD in 1961 at Harvard ( Combinatorial problems of elementary group theory ) with Andrew Gleason. Her dissertation was on coding theory ( a subject for which she became interested after a lecture by RC Bose at Bell Labs) and contained the later named after her MacWilliams identity coding theory that the Gewichtszählpolynom a code to that of its dual code their association. In 1983, she was at Bell Labs in retirement.

In 1977, her book with Neil Sloane, " The Theory of Error Correcting Codes" in North -Holland, an encyclopedic work with over 1500 references, which was very influential for coding theory.

In 1980 she was the first Noether Lecturer. Her daughter Ann was also a mathematician and even studied at the same time at Harvard when her mother received his doctorate there.