Bettina Richmond

Martha Bettina Richmond (née Zoeller, January 30, 1958 – November 22, 2009) was a German-American mathematician, mathematics textbook author, professor at Western Kentucky University, and murder victim.

Life

Richmond was born in Dresden on January 30, 1958,^[1] earned a vordiplom (the German equivalent of a bachelor's degree) from the University of Würzburg,^[E] and completed her Ph.D. at Florida State University in 1985.^[2] Her doctoral dissertation, Freeness of Hopf algebras over grouplike subalgebras, was supervised by Warren Nichols, a student of Irving Kaplansky.^[3]

She became a professor at Western Kentucky University, teaching there for 23 years.^[2] Topics in her mathematical research included abstract algebra, transformation semigroups, ring theory, and Hopf algebra,^[A][B] including the proof of the Nichols–Zoeller freeness theorem in Hopf algebra.^[A][4] With her husband, Thomas Richmond, she was the author of a mathematics textbook, A Discrete Transition to Advanced Mathematics.^[C] She also published works in recreational mathematics.^[D][E]

Murder

Richmond was stabbed to death on November 22, 2009, in the parking lot of a racquetball facility in downtown Bowling Green, Kentucky. According to the FBI, her murder was likely an opportunistic crime motivated by armed robbery.^[5] At the time of her death, she had been on leave from her faculty position to assist her father in Germany. The murder is still unsolved.^[6]

Selected publications

A.	Nichols, Warren D.; Zoeller, M. Bettina (1989), "A Hopf algebra freeness theorem", American Journal of Mathematics, 111 (2): 381–385, doi:10.2307/2374514, JSTOR 2374514, MR 0987762

B.	Nichols, Warren D.; Richmond, M. Bettina (1996), "The Grothendieck group of a Hopf algebra", Journal of Pure and Applied Algebra, 106 (3): 297–306, doi:10.1016/0022-4049(95)00023-2, MR 1375826

C.	Richmond, Bettina; Richmond, Thomas (2004), A Discrete Transition To Advanced Mathematics, Thomson/Brooks/Cole; reprinted by American Mathematical Society, Pure and Applied Undergraduate Texts 3, 2009; 2nd ed., Pure and Applied Undergraduate Texts 63, 2023[7]

D.	Richmond, Bettina; Richmond, Tom (December 2009), "How to recognize a parabola", The American Mathematical Monthly, 116 (10): 910–922, doi:10.4169/000298909x477023, S2CID 14700430

E.	Richmond, Bettina (November 2010), "On a perplexing polynomial puzzle" (PDF), The College Mathematics Journal, 41 (5): 400–403, doi:10.4169/074683410x522017, S2CID 120119286