 King's College, Aberdeen |
Sheila Scott Macintyre lived from 23 April 1910 to 21 March 1960. She was a mathematician. The wider picture in Scotland at the time is set out in our Historical Timeline.
Sheila Scott was born in Edinburgh, the daughter of the Rector of Trinity Academy. She was educated at Edinburgh Ladies' College and then studied at the University of Edinburgh, graduating in 1932, and at at Girton College, Cambridge. Sheila published her first paper, on the asymptotic periods of integral functions, in 1933. She returned to Scotland in 1934 to teach mathematics at St Leonards School and Sixth Form College, in St Andrews.
Sheila Scott Macintyre subsequently met Archibald James Macintyre, a professor at the University of Aberdeen. The two married in 1940 and Sheila took up a post as an assistant lecturer at Aberdeen University. In 1947 she was awarded a PhD for a thesis entitled Some problems in interpolatory function theory. Over the following ten years, as well as bringing up her children, Sheila published ten more academic papers. She also started work on a multilingual scientific dictionary, written in English, German, and Russian.
In 1958 Sheila became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Later in the same year the Macintyres emigrated to the USA where both had been offered visiting research professorships at the University of Cincinnati. Sheila Scott Macintyre died in 1960 at the early age of 50.
This biography draws on research first published in "The Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women".
