Charlotte Froese Fischer

Charlotte Froese Fischer is a mathematician and computer scientist who gained worldwide recognition for developing and implementing the Multi-Configurational Hartree-Fock approach to atomic structure calculations, and for her predictions on the negative calcium ion. Fischer was born in 1929 in Pravdivka, Ukraine, and soon after, the family was forced to flee, first to Germany and then to Chilliwack, British Columbia. Fischer earned a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics and Chemistry and a Master’s in Applied Mathematics from the University of British Columbia. At Cambridge University, she worked on the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator for atomic structure calculations and received her PhD in Applied Mathematics and Computing in 1957. She returned to Canada and served until 1968 on the mathematics faculty at UBC, where she introduced numerical analysis and computer courses into the curriculum and helped establish the Computer Science Department. At Harvard in the mid-1960s, Fischer researched atomic structure calculations and was the first woman to be awarded the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship. The recipient of numerous honours, she was made a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1991.

“I was always expected to help at home, which meant that school for me was like a vacation.”