Rosalind Tanner

Rosalind Cecilia Hildegard Tanner (née Young) (5 February 1900 – 24 November 1992) was a mathematician and historian of mathematics.^[1] She was the eldest daughter of the mathematicians Grace and William Young. She was born and lived in Göttingen in Germany (where her parents worked at the university) until 1908.^[2] During her life she used the name Cecily.^[3]

Rosalind joined the University of Lausanne in 1917. She also helped her father's research between 1919 and 1921 at the University College Wales in Aberystwyth, and worked with Edward Collingwood, also of Aberystwyth, on a translation of Georges Valiron's course on Integral Functions.^[3] She received a L-És-sc (a Bachelor's degree) from Lausanne in 1925.^[4]

She then studied at Girton College, Cambridge, gaining a PhD in 1929 under the supervision of Professor E. W. Hobson^[5] for research on Stieltjes integration. She accepted a teaching post at Imperial College, London where she worked until 1967.^[3]

After 1936, most of her research was in the history of mathematics, and she had a particular interest in Thomas Harriot, an Elizabethan mathematician. She set up the Harriot Seminars in Oxford and Durham. Rosalind married William Tanner in 1953; however, he died a few months after their marriage. Her interest in sixteenth and seventeenth century mathematics continued after her retirement, and she died on 24 November 1992.^[3]

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