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Through Tessellation and World War II
Biography
Schattschneider was born in Staten Island; her mother, Charlotte Lucile Ingalls Wood, taught Latin and was herself the daughter of a Staten Island school principal, and her father, Robert W. Wood, Jr., was an electrical engineer who worked for the New York City Bureau of Bridge Design. Her family moved to Lake Placid, New York during World War II, while her father served as an engineer for the U. S. Army; she began her schooling in Lake Placid, but returned to Staten Island after the war. She did her undergraduate studies in mathematics at the University of Rochester, and earned a Ph.D. in 1966 from Yale University under the joint supervision of Tsuneo Tamagawa and Ichirô Satake with the thesis, Restricted Roots of a Semi-simple Algebraic Group. She taught at Northwestern University for a year and at the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle for three years before joining the faculty of Moravian College in 1968, where she remained for 34 years until her retirement. She was the first female editor of Mathematics Magazine, from 1981 to 1985.
She was married for 54 years to the Rev. Dr. David A. Schattschneider (1939-2016), a church historian and Dean of Moravian Theological Seminary; their daughter Laura Ellen Schattschneider is a lawyer.
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Schattschneider and Marjorie Rice
Marjorie Rice was an amateur mathematician in San Diego who became fascinated by Martin Gardner’s descriptions of tessellations by pentagonal tiles in Scientific American. She investigated, and devising her own notation system, found a previously unknown type of pentagon tiling by February 1976. She drew up several tessellations by these new pentagon tiles and mailed her discoveries to Martin Gardner. He, in turn, sent Rice's work to Schattschneider, who was an expert in tiling patterns. Schattschneider was skeptical at first, but upon careful examination, was able to validate Rice's results. Schattschneider not only helped Martin Gardner publicize the pentagon tilings discoveries of Rice, but lauded her work as a significant discovery by an amateur mathematician.
In 1995, at a regional meeting of the Mathematical Association of America held in Los Angeles, Schattschneider convinced Rice and her husband to attend her lecture on Rice's work. At the conclusion of the talk, Schattschneider introduced the amateur mathematician who had advanced the study of tessellation. "And everybody in the room . . . gave her a standing ovation."