Margaret Willerding

Margaret Frances Willerding (1919–2003) was an American mathematician known for her combinatorial enumeration of quadratic forms, for her mathematics textbooks, and for her editorship of the problems department of the mathematics journal School Science and Mathematics.

Early life and education Willerding was born on April 26, 1919, in St. Louis, Missouri. After graduating from high school in 1936, she went to a local school, Harris Teachers College, despite being highly ambitious academically, because it was free; her parents were not especially supportive and could not afford a more expensive school. She majored in education there, with a minor in mathematics, and graduated in 1940.

After a year working as a schoolteacher, she went to Saint Louis University for graduate study in mathematics, choosing it as the best of the two universities local enough to allow her to continue living with her parents, and despite her mother's dismissal of her academic ambitions. During this time she continued working as a schoolteacher to support herself, before obtaining a fellowship in the final year of her program, the first woman to do so. She earned a master's degree in 1943 and completed her Ph.D. in 1947.

Her dissertation, Determination of All Classes of Positive Quaternary Quadratic Forms Which Represent All (Positive) Integers, was supervised by Arnold Ross. A short summary of it was later published in the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, the main result of which being that "there are exactly 178 classes of universal classic positive quaternary quadratic forms". This was later found to be incorrect. Based on the use of the 15 theorem, Manjul Bhargava determined the correct number to be 204. As noted by John H. Conway,