UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ARCHIVES
ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

Interview #465
HIRSCHFELDER, ELIZABETH

HIRSCHFELDER, Elizabeth (1902-2002)
Graduate Student; Assistant Professor of Mathematics
At UW: 1928-30; 1931-53

Interviewed:	1995	
Interviewer: 	Barry Teicher
Indexed by:	Barry Teicher
Length: 	1 hour, 55 minutes

Education at Brown; Teaching at University of Texas in 1920s; Graduate work at UW under Mark Ingraham; Teaching at UW during Depression and WWII; Husband Joe Hirschfelder; UW presidents and deans; Expansion of UW after WWII; Prominent figures in Mathematics Department; University League; Joe Hirschfelder’s early training and work with Robert Oppenheimer; Theoretical Chemistry Institute; Prominent figures in Chemistry Department; Foundation of Hirschfelder Prize; Joe Hirschfelder at University of California-Santa Barbara.

First Interview Session (October 16, 1995): Digital File

Tape 1/Side 1

00:00:00	Start of Interview/Interviewer’s Introduction

00:00:18	[begin tape 1; side 1] EH grew up in Providence, Rhode Island and went to Brown, where she earned her master's degree. There were three women math majors in class; all three got teaching jobs in colleges.  EH mentions two professors at Brown who influenced her, Raymond Archibald and Roland Richardson, who was instrumental with the American Mathematical Society.

00:02:44	After graduation, EH taught at the University of Texas-Austin.  Austin was still a segregated campus.  She was the only young female in the department.  She taught first-year calculus.  

00:04:16	EH did not experience discrimination as a woman at Texas.  There was a small faculty women's club, and the secretary to UT's president took EH under her wing.  EH enjoyed that year.  

00:05:58	During that year, a new technological college opened in Lubbock (Texas Tech).  EH did not expect to be kept on at Austin, so she applied for a job in Lubbock and got it.  EH describes life in Lubbock in 1925, which was a small town at the time.  

00:08:48	Returning to her years in the east, EH notes that two of her professors at Brown told her they felt strongly that women should be given the chance to succeed in academia.  They also noted that having three women students at the same time was a bit unusual.  One of these three women went to teach at a small school in North Carolina; another went to Oklahoma and later to a college in New York state.

00:10:46	EH describes working at the technological college, where she taught mostly freshman.   The students were not very good, and classes were large.  EH spent a lot of time grading papers, but on the whole she enjoyed it.  Her salary was around $2000 a year.  She taught there for three years and returned again after she got her Ph.D.  

00:14:12	EH discusses a graduate summer session in math at Brown, where she took a course with Mark Ingraham.  At the end of the summer, Ingraham moved to Wisconsin along with Rudolph Langer, who was also at Brown.  EH was Ingraham's first Ph.D. student at the UW.   She describes him as an excellent teacher; though he was not polished like Langer, he was inspiring.

00:17:01	After the summer session at Brown, EH went back to Texas Tech.  At Ingraham's suggestion, she applied for a fellowship at the UW and got it.  She came to Wisconsin in 1928 and got her degree in 1930, and her field of specialty was Abstract Algebra.  She then taught for a year in Texas.  She returned to Wisconsin to get married in 1931.  During her first few years at the UW, EH taught freshman in the math department.

00:19:21	During the Depression, the regents wanted to cut down on postdoctoral fellows and graduate students, but the faculty agreed to take a pay cut to keep them.  EH filled in for Ingraham one year and took over two of his advanced courses.  Many students had to drop out of school during the Depression.

00:21:57	EH remembers where she was when Pearl Harbor was bombed.  The UW was part of the National Research Society, which would help the U.S. plan what to do if it had to join the war.  EH’s husband, Ivan Sokolnikoff, went to New York after Pearl Harbor to continue his research.  During the war, EH taught calculus and differential equations to V-12s  (Navy college training program) who were engineers.  One of her students was Warren Stewart, now an emeritus professor.  During the war there were classes every day and a heavier schedule.  Classes were still in North Hall.

00:26:46	After the atomic bomb was dropped, EH understood why some UW faculty had “disappeared” to work at Los Alamos.  She remembers the UW faculty who went to work there, including Hugh Richards, Julian Mack, and Stanislaw Ulam and his wife, Francoise.  She describes the air of secrecy around the project.

00:30:35	[end side 1; begin side 2] Quite a lot of UW physicists went to Los Alamos; none were left in chemical physics or applied theoretical physics.  Joe Hirschfelder taught those courses until he went to Los Alamos.  He had already applied to the Air Force, but went to Los Alamos when General Groves asked him to.  EH briefly discusses Groves.

00:35:00	At Los Alamos, Joe Hirschfelder lived with his mother, who came and went as she liked; this was unusual at Los Alamos.  EH talks about an American Indian potter who lived next door.  EH and Hirshfelder were married in 1953.  

00:37:14	EH briefly mentions the Los Alamos symposium that was organized by Joe Hirschfelder and another professor in 1983.

00:39:34	EH divorced Sokolnikoff, her first husband, after WWII; they had been separated during the war years.  He went to UCLA at the same time as Clarence Dykstra.

00:40:29	EH briefly discusses various University presidents and deans, including Glenn Frank and George Sellery. Slichter, the dean of the Grad School, was wonderful, and his wife was very charming. When Clarence Dykstra left, it didn't seem to make very much of a difference.  EH knew E. B. Fred best.  She often walked with him from the parking lot to Bascom Hall in the mornings, and she knew his wife from the University League.  

0:44:50	With the return of the veterans after World War II, the University expanded, particularly in engineering and math.  After EH’s husband, Ivan Sokolnikoff, left, she was kept on as an instructor; later, she became an assistant professor.   Most of the veterans were wonderful students.  Lectures were in Bascom and quizzes were in North Hall to accommodate the large number of students.  

0:48:00	EH briefly discusses Florence Allen, the other female professor in the math department while EH was there. Allen was promoted to assistant professor in 1944-46, just before retiring. She counseled many students and was very kind. EH says she did not expe- rience discrimination as a woman in the math department. She says they were happy to have a woman who would take over some of the social duties in the department.

00:49:55	Mark Ingraham and Rudolph Langer took turns being chairman during EH's tenure in the math department.  Ingraham was very prominent in the National Math Society. Cyrus MacDuffie was another chair during this time.  EH describes Langer in some detail.  Some of his art collection is now at the Madison Art Center, where he was chairman of the board.

00:54:10	E. B. Van Vleck was chairman of the math department from 1925-28.  Van Vleck was the dominating person until the end of his chairmanship.  He was also interested in Japanese art; the Elvehjem has part of his collection.

00:56:09	EH discusses Warren Weaver, an applied mathematician who later became head of the Rockefeller Foundation.  He was chairman of the math department for three years.  He and Herman March were well-known in applied mathematics.  Ivan Sokolnikoff came here to work with them.  The book EH and Sokolnikoff wrote came out of lectures of Weaver and March had started; the book was for engineers and physicists who wanted to go beyond elementary mathematics.  Weaver was a great friend of Ingraham's.

00:58:54	EH remembers Arnold Dresden, another well-known mathematician who left the UW in 1926.  EH met him at a Christmas meeting of the Math Society in New York, where she went to the opera with him.  The Math Society was much smaller before the war.  Now meetings tend to be compartmentalized.

01:00:48	[End tape 1; begin tape 2] EH mentions various faculty in the math department and where they are now, including Stephen Kleene, who got the Medal of Science before he died; Kenneth Arnold; Churchill Eisenhart; Robert Specht; Laurence Young; and John Miller, who was also in education and was an associate dean.

0:02:45	EH discusses the University League and its various activities, including an annual picnic for foreign students sponsored by the Madison Friends of International Students.  This group was originally a way to facilitate interactions between international students and women—both women faculty and wives of male faculty. EH and Ineva Baldwin worked with a law professor to get the League incorporated.

01:07:51	When EH married Joe Hirschfelder in 1954, he suggested to Mark Ingraham to fire her so they could travel to various places where he had been invited to speak.  Ingraham said Joe would have to go speak to EH about that himself. In 1957 they went on a six-month tour of Asia and Europe, where Hirschfelder gave lectures. 

01:10:36	EH describes Joe Hirschfelder’s training at Yale and Princeton.  This was the time when refugees were coming over from Europe and a lot of them were at Princeton, including Albert Einstein.  After Princeton, Hirschfelder got a postdoctoral fellowship through Farrington Daniels and came to the UW in 1938.  He was not at the UW long before he went to Los Alamos, where he stayed for three years.  He was at the UW at the time of the test on Bikini.  

01:14:15	Joe Hirschfelder knew Robert Oppenheimer well.  Oppenheimer’s office door was always open until the Los Alamos group got too big.  EH met Oppenheimer only once, on an annual trip with Joe to the Virgin Islands, where the Oppenheimers had a house.  By that time, Oppenheimer’s wife had been accused of being a communist.

01:17:11	At Los Alamos, specialists like Joe Hirschfelder were brought in to work on only one phase of a problem, but they had to stay after they were done because they knew too much.  EH describes Hirschfelder’s reaction to the dropping of the bomb.

01:19:44	EH discusses the beginnings of the Theoretical Chemistry Institute, which was started after Los Alamos by Joe Hirschfelder, Chuck Curtiss and Charles Boyd.  EH briefly details the careers of Curtiss and Boyd.  There was also a core of female math majors who worked at the institute.

01:22:44	Three of Joe Hirschfelder’s students were trained at the UW and stayed.  One was Bob Bird, a chemical engineering professor, who EH describes.  He still writes papers with Chuck Curtiss.  Phillip Certain, now the dean of L&S, was also one of Hirschfelder’s students.  He was like a son.  EH sees him often.

01:26:46	EH discusses the professors she knows in the chemistry department, including Bob Alberty, Paul Bender and his wife (who was in meteorology), and John Ferry.  Homer Adkins was Joe Hirschfelder’s idol; Hirschfelder named his professorship after him. 

01:31:03	EH continues briefly to discuss members of the chemistry department, including Aaron Ihde, who recently wrote a history of the department; Ed Larsen; and Villiers Meloche, who was on the athletic board and whose wife was in charge of the placement office.  Irv Shain gave a talk at her funeral.   EH knew Shain and liked him.  John Willard came to the UW within a year of Joe Hirschfelder, and both retired within a year of each other.  Willard worked in Chicago during the war and later became dean of the Graduate School.  A lot of deans came out of the chemistry department, but Willard found administration took too much time from his research.  

01:34:46	Joe Hirschfelder was not interested in administration, although he ran his own group in chemistry.   He had offers from other institutions, but never seriously considered them.  He had a NASA grant that was used to bring in researchers and install computer equipment.  EH explains the setup of the chemistry department when it was on Johnson Street and tells how the grant was used in the department’s new building. 

01:38:07	The Theoretical Chemistry Institute is still going.  Jim Skinner has the Hirschfelder professorship now and is in charge of lectures and the Hirschfelder Prize.

01:38:53	EH explains in detail how the Hirschfelder Prize was set up after Joe Hirschfelder died.  It was originally supposed to be named for Hirschfelder’s father and grandfather, but EH was told to name it for Joe.

01:42:31	EH tells how Joe Hirschfelder came to teach at the University of California-Santa Barbara for several months out of the year, so that he could leave Madison in the winter.  For several years he and EH went to Florida, but when Joe was invited to California, they started going there.  As soon as Joe became emeritus, they started going for longer periods of time.  UCSB is now celebrating its 50th anniversary.  Joe arranged for a series of lectures in Santa Barbara relating to Los Alamos; the oral history project has copies of these lectures.

01:49:38	EH describes her friends and her life in Santa Barbara, where she goes for several months every winter.   

01:54:47	End of First Interview Session

End of Interview #465