A. Mary Tropper

Agnes Mary Tropper (née Barnett; 1917–2009) was a British mathematician, textbook author, and translator.

Early life and education

Agnes Mary Barnett was born in Sheffield in 1917, and grew up in London. She was educated at Christ's Hospital, a boarding school in Hertford, supported by a scholarship from the county of London. She read mathematics at Bedford College, London,^[1] a school for the higher education of women in the University of London that later became part of Royal Holloway, University of London,^[2] and earned first-class honours in 1939.^[1] She also earned an education diploma from the London Institute of Education,^[1] another school of the University of London that later merged into University College London as the UCL Institute of Education.^[3]

In the early 1940s she studied part-time for a master's degree at Birkbeck College, while working as a teacher.^[1] She completed a Ph.D. in 1953, through the University of London. Her doctoral dissertation, Infinite Matrices: A Study of Sequence Transformations and Reciprocals, was supervised by Richard G. Cooke.^[4]

Teaching career and later life

Barnett taught at the Godolphin School in Salisbury from 1940 to 1942, and then in Harrow. In 1946, she became a lecturer at Queen Mary College. Soon after, she married another academic at the college, Austrian electrical engineer Hans Tropper, changed her name to his, and began raising a family (two daughters) with him.^[1] One daughter, Anne Tropper (born 1954), later became a notable physicist.^[5]

Despite being told that "to continue her career, her main priority must be the College",^[1] she continued at Queen Mary, focusing primarily in teaching, administration, and textbook authorship rather than mathematics research.^[1]

She died on 6 February 2009.^[1]

Books

Tropper was the author of:

• Linear Algebra / An Introduction to Linear Algebra (London: Nelson, 1969, 1981; New York: Elsevier, 1969)^[6]
• Matrix Theory for Electrical Engineers / Matrix Theory for Electrical Engineering Students (London: Harrap, 1962, 1966; Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley, 1962; German translation, Mannheim: Bibliographisches Institut, 1964, 1975; French translation, Paris: Masson, 1965; Spanish translation, Madrid: Paraninfo, 1967)^[7]

Her translations from German into English include:

• Integral Equations (Guido Hoheisel; London: Nelson, 1967)^[8]
• Introduction to Modern Mathematics (Herbert Meschkowski; London: Harrap, 1968)^[9]