Joanne Elliott

Elliott was born on December 5, 1925, in Providence, Rhode Island,^[3] and graduated from Brown University in 1947.^[3] She completed her Ph.D. at Cornell University in 1950, as part of a handful of "outstanding graduate students" working at Cornell in the post-World-War-II decade.^[4] Her dissertation, On Some Singular Integral Equations of the Cauchy Type, was supervised by Harry Pollard.^[5]

After a year at Swarthmore College, she worked at Mount Holyoke College as an assistant professor from 1952 until 1956, when she moved to Barnard College.^[6] In 1958, she was the supervisor of Doris Stockton's doctorate at Brown University.^[7] In 1961, as an associate professor at Barnard, she was funded by the National Science Foundation to visit the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey for postdoctoral research.^[8] She also worked at the Institute for Defense Analyses in Princeton in the early 1960s.^[2]

She came to Rutgers University in 1964, at a time when Rutgers had a much higher number of female faculty than many mathematics departments then or later.^[9] Among her graduate students at Rutgers was Edward R. Dougherty, later a distinguished professor of electrical engineering at Texas A&M University.^[5] She chaired the Rutgers mathematics department from 1974 to 1977.^[9] Elliott retired from Rutgers in 1991, in a year in which the university was cutting costs by offering early retirement to its employees.^[9]

Elliott died in Titusville, New Jersey on March 5, 2023, at the age of 97.^[10]