Vera Pless

Vera Pless (nee Stepen; March 5, 1931 – March 2, 2020) was an American mathematician who specialized in combinatorics and coding theory. She was professor emerita at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Biography Vera Stepen was born on Chicago's west side to a Russian Jewish immigrant family. As a teenager, she was more interested in playing the cello than in mathematics, but she left high school two years early to go to the University of Chicago, and finished her studies there in three years. she stayed at the university for a master's degree, which she earned in 1952 not long after marrying her husband, a high-energy experimental physicist.

She began working in physics at the University of Chicago, but soon won a fellowship to study at Northwestern University. Her husband became a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Pless moved with him to Massachusetts, where she completed her doctorate from Northwestern in 1957 under the supervision of Kaplansky's student Alex F. T. W. Rosenberg, soon before the birth of her first child.

When the Mansfield amendment banned the military from performing basic research, and died at her home in Oak Park, Illinois on March 2, 2020 at the age of 88.

Awards and honors In 2012 she became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

Selected publications 2nd ed., 1989; 3rd ed., 1998.