Elizabeth Monroe Boggs
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
April 5, 1913
Elizabeth Monroe Boggs | |
|---|---|
| Born | Elizabeth Monroe April 5, 1913 Cleveland, Ohio, U.S. |
| Died | January 27, 1996 (aged 82) Camden, New Jersey, U.S. |
| Alma mater | |
| Spouse |
Fitzhugh Willets Boggs
(m. 1941; died 1971) |
Elizabeth Monroe Boggs (April 5, 1913 - January 27, 1996) was an American policy maker, scholar, and advocate for people with developmental disabilities. The University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey named "The Elizabeth M. Boggs Center on Developmental Disabilities" in late 1997 in her honor.
Elizabeth Monroe Boggs was born in Cleveland, Ohio to Francis Adair Monroe Jr., a chemical engineer, and Elizabeth McNairy. She attended Concord Academy[1] and, in 1935, Elizabeth graduated from Bryn Mawr College summa cum laude, with distinction in mathematics.[2] While at Bryn Mawr, she studied with mathematician Emmy Noether before Noether's death in 1935.[3] John Lennard-Jones supervised her PhD work in the Theoretical Chemistry Laboratory at the University of Cambridge[4], where her thesis project focused on solving the Schrödinger equation for a heteronuclear diatomic ion[5]. Maurice Vincent Wilkes assisted her with the university's differential analyser built out of Meccano.[6][7]
After graduating in 1939, Monroe Boggs joined John Kirkwood’s group at Cornell University. Here, she shared an office with Fitzhugh Willets Boggs (1911-1971), Kirkwood's graduate student; they were married in 1941[8][9]. During the 1942-1943 academic year, she lectured introductory physics to pre-medical and pre-dental students at the University of Pittsburgh. However, as she was unsatisfied with the lack of research opportunities, Edward Condon secured her a position[5] at the Explosives Research Laboratory in Bruceton, Pennsylvania during the war years.[10]
Along with ERL leader George B. Kistiakowsky, Monroe Boggs eventually relocated from ERL to Los Alamos to participate in Division X of the Manhattan Project[5]. Her research on explosive lenses contributed to the implosion-type atom bomb used in the Trinity test and on Nagasaki.[11][12]
Her last day at Los Alamos was August 6, 1945, the day the uranium bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, leaving her research career because she was pregnant[5]. After the birth of their son David (1945–2000),[13] who had developmental disabilities following an infection,[14][15] she became involved in advocacy and the development of public policy for people with disabilities.
Research achievements
Elizabeth Monroe Boggs' thesis worked entailed building part of the Cambridge Meccano model differential analyser and using it to solve the quantum chemistry problem for a heteroatom diatomic ion.[16][5] Her best-known finding is her prediction in 1940, with John G. Kirkwood, in the Journal of Chemical Physics,[17][18] that a system of hard spheres would undergo a first-order liquid-crystal phase transition. The 1942 paper clearly states the seminal prediction that a system of hard spheres without attraction must crystallize at sufficiently small volumes.
