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Charlotte Froese Fischer

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Charlotte Froese Fischer (September 21, 1929 – February 8, 2024) was a Canadian-American applied mathematician, computer scientist and physicist noted for the development and implementation of the Multi-Configurational Hartree–Fock (MCHF) approach to atomic-structure calculations and its application to the description of atomic structure and spectra.[1]

Charlotte Froese Fischer
Fischer at EDSAC
Born
Charlotte Froese

(1929-09-21)September 21, 1929
Stara Mykolaivka, Donetsk, Ukraine
DiedFebruary 8, 2024(2024-02-08) (aged 94)
Maryland, U.S.
Alma materUniversity of British Columbia
University of Cambridge
Spouse
​
​
(m. 1967; died 2011)​
AwardsSloan Research Fellowship
Fellow of the American Physical Society
Member, Royal Physiographic Society in Lund
Fulbright Senior Research Award
Foreign Member, Lithuanian Academy of Sciences
Honorary Doctorate, Malmö University
Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada
Honorary Doctorate, Western University
Scientific career
InstitutionsUniversity of British Columbia
Harvard College Observatory
Vanderbilt University
National Institute of Standards and Technology
Doctoral advisorDouglas Hartree

The experimental discovery of the negative ion of calcium[2] was motivated by her theoretical prediction of its existence.[3] This was the first known anion of a Group 2 element.[4][5] Its discovery was cited in Froese Fischer's election to Fellow of the American Physical Society.

Early life

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Charlotte Froese was born on September 21, 1929, in the village of Stara Mykolaivka (formerly Pravdivka, and Nikolayevka[6]), in the Donetsk region, in the present-day Ukraine, to parents of Mennonite descent. Her parents immigrated to Germany in 1929 on the last train allowed to cross the border before its closure by Soviet authorities. After a few months in a refugee camp, her family was allowed to immigrate to Canada, where they eventually established themselves in Chilliwack, British Columbia.

Education and research

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She obtained both a B.A. degree, with honors, in Mathematics and Chemistry and an M.A. degree in Applied Mathematics from the University of British Columbia in 1952 and 1954, respectively. She then obtained her Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics and Computing at Cambridge University in 1957, pursuing coursework in quantum theory with Paul Dirac. She worked under the supervision of Douglas Hartree, whom she assisted in programming the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC) for atomic-structure calculations.

She served on the mathematics faculty of the University of British Columbia from 1957 till 1968, where she introduced numerical analysis and computer courses into the curriculum and was instrumental in the formation of the Computer Science Department. Froese Fischer spent 1963-64 at the Harvard College Observatory, where she extended her research on atomic-structure calculations. While at Harvard, she was the first woman scientist to be awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship. In 1991 she became a Fellow of the American Physical Society, in part for her contribution to the discovery of negative calcium. In 1995 she was elected a member of the Royal Physiographic Society in Lund, in 2004 a foreign member of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences, and in 2015 she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Technology from Malmö University, Sweden.

Contributions

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Froese Fischer was the author of over 300 research articles on computational atomic theory, many of which have had far-reaching impact in the area of atomic-structure calculations. The early version of her MCHF program, published in the first volume of Computer Physics Communications received two Citation Classics Awards in 1987. She authored an influential monograph on Hartree-Fock approaches to the first-principles calculation of atomic structure,[7] and coauthored a substantial successor work.[8] One of her largest efforts in the field is the calculation of the complete lower spectra of the beryllium-like to argon-like isoelectronic sequences, amounting to the publication of data covering 400 journal pages and a total of over 150 ions.[9][10] She also authored a scientific biography of her Ph.D. thesis advisor, Douglas Hartree.[11]

Froese Fischer was an research professor of computer science at Vanderbilt University and a Guest Scientist in the Atomic Spectroscopy Group at NIST. From 1967 to 2011, she was married to Patrick C. Fischer, himself a noted computer scientist and professor at Vanderbilt,[12] and the mother of Carolyn Fischer, an environmental economist.[1] An autobiographical account of her own life up to the year 2000 was published in Molecular Physics,[13] and a biographical review of her scientific work up to 2019 has been published in Atoms.[14] She died on February 8, 2024 at her home in Maryland.[1]

References

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  1. ^ a b c Falk, Dan (March 28, 2024). "Scientist Charlotte Froese Fischer was considered the 'first lady of computational atomic structure theory'". The Globe and Mail. Retrieved April 16, 2024.
  2. ^ Pegg, D. J.; Thompson, J. S.; Compton, R. N.; Alton, G. D. (1987), "Evidence for a stable negative ion of calcium", Physical Review Letters, 59 (20): 2267–2270, Bibcode:1987PhRvL..59.2267P, doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.59.2267, PMID 10035499
  3. ^ Froese Fischer, Charlotte; Lagowski, Jolanta B.; Vosko, S.H. (1987), "Ground States of Ca− and Sc− from Two Theoretical Points of View", Physical Review Letters, 59 (20): 2263–2266, Bibcode:1987PhRvL..59.2263F, doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.59.2263, PMID 10035498
  4. ^ Buckman, Stephen J.; Clark, Charles W. (1994), "Atomic negative-ion resonances", Reviews of Modern Physics, 66 (2): 539–655, Bibcode:1994RvMP...66..539B, doi:10.1103/RevModPhys.66.539
  5. ^ Andersen, T.; Haugen, H. K.; Hotop, H. (1999), "Binding Energies in Atomic Negative Ions: III", Journal of Physical and Chemical Reference Data, 28 (6): 1511–1533, Bibcode:1999JPCRD..28.1511A, doi:10.1063/1.556047
  6. ^ Huebert, Helmut T.; Schroeder, William (1996). Mennonite Historical Atlas. Springfield Publishers. ISBN 978-0920643044.
  7. ^ Froese-Fischer, Charlotte (1977). The Hartree-Fock method for atoms : a numerical approach. New York: Wiley Interscience. ISBN 047125990X.
  8. ^ Froese-Fischer, Charlotte; Brage, Tomas; Jönsson, Per (1997). Computational atomic structure: an MCHF approach. Bristol and Philadelphia: Institute of Physics Publishing. ISBN 0750303743.
  9. ^ Froese Fischer, C.; Tachiev, G. (2004). "Breit-Pauli energy levels, lifetimes, and transition probabilities for the beryllium-like to neon-like sequences". Atomic Data and Nuclear Data Tables. 87 (1): 1–184. Bibcode:2004ADNDT..87....1F. doi:10.1016/j.adt.2004.02.001..
  10. ^ Froese Fischer, C.; Tachiev, G.; Irimia, A. (2006), "Relativistic energy levels, lifetimes, and transition probabilities of the sodium-like to argon-like sequences", Atomic Data and Nuclear Data Tables, 92 (5): 607–812, Bibcode:2006ADNDT..92..607F, doi:10.1016/j.adt.2006.03.001.
  11. ^ Froese-Fischer, Charlotte (2003). Douglas Rayner Hartree: His Life In Science And Computing. Singapore: World Scientific. ISBN 9814485209.
  12. ^ "Patrick Fischer, 1935–2011: Professor was targeted by the Unabomber", Los Angeles Times, September 3, 2011
  13. ^ Froese Fischer, Charlotte (2000), "Reminiscences at the End of the Century", Molecular Physics, 98 (16): 1043–1050, Bibcode:2000MolPh..98.1043F, doi:10.1080/00268970050080393, S2CID 121650151
  14. ^ Hibbert, Alan (2019), "Charlotte Froese Fischer—Her Work and Her Impact", Atoms, 7 (4): 107, Bibcode:2019Atoms...7..107H, doi:10.3390/atoms7040107
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