Lucy Joan Slater


Lucy Joan Slater was a mathematician who worked on hypergeometric functions, and who found many generalizations of the Rogers–Ramanujan identities.

Early life

Slater was born in 1922 and homeschooled for much of her early education. Her father died when she was nine years old. Slater was interested in jazz music and played the piano as an accompanist in her early years. She attended college at Bedford College and received her first B.A. from London University in 1944. During the war, she worked teaching soldiers trigonometry.

Career

Her advisor was Wilfrid Norman Bailey. She received an M.A. and Ph.D. from London University while studying hypergeometric equations, including her publication of a list of over 100 Rogers-Ramanujan Identities. Later, she received a D.Litt. from London University as well. In the early 1950s she played a leading role at Cambridge University in devising a precursor of modern computer operating systems, and subsequently she helped to develop computer programs for econometrics, working for much of the time with UK government officials. She received a Ph.D. and Sc.D. from Cambridge and was named assistant director of Research in the Department of Economics in 1962.
She retired in 1982 and subsequently devoted much of her time to genealogy.

Writing

Her memoirs include descriptions of life as a teenager in Portsmouth during the bombing of the Second World War, and of working with early computers at Cambridge. In 1997 she completed a remarkable listing of all the graves at the Parish of the Ascension Burial Ground in Cambridge and their inscriptions in the burial ground; she wrote a paper called "A Walk round the Ascension Burial Ground, Cambridge" which describes over 100 of the graves as though the reader is walking around the burial ground and includes detailed maps. The fourth edition is dated December 1994.

Death

She was buried at the Parish of the Ascension Burial Ground in Cambridge in 2008 in the same grave as her mother, Lucy Dalton Slater, widow of John Wardle Slater F.I.C., Admiralty chemist, buried in Portsmouth.

Recognition

In 2016 the Council of the University of Cambridge approved the use of Slater's name to mark a physical feature within the North West Cambridge Development.

Publications

Fortran programs for economists, Cambridge University Press, 1967First steps in basic Fortran, London: Chapman & Hall, 1971More Fortran programs for economists, Cambridge University Press, 1972GEM: a general econometric matrix program, Cambridge University Press, 1976Dynamic regression: theory and algorithms, Halsted Press, 1980