Charlotte Froese Fischer

Charlotte Froese Fischer (born 1929) is a Canadian-American applied mathematician and computer scientist who gained world recognition for the development and implementation of the Multi-Configurational Hartree–Fock (MCHF) approach to atomic-structure calculations and for her theoretical prediction concerning the existence of the negative calcium ion.  For this last accomplishment, she was elected to grade of Fellow of the American Physical Society. 

Early life
Charlotte Froese was born on September 21, 1929, in the village of Pravdivka (formerly Nikolayevka), in the  Donetsk region, in the present-day Ukraine, to parents of Mennonite descent.  Her parents immigrated to Germany in 1929 on the last train allowed to cross the border before its closure by Soviet authorities.  After a few months in a refugee camp, her family was allowed to immigrate to Canada, where they eventually established themselves in Chilliwack, British Columbia. 

Education and research
She obtained both a B.A. degree, with honors, in Mathematics and Chemistry and an M.A. degree in Applied Mathematics from the University of British Columbia in 1952 and 1954, respectively.  She then obtained her Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics and Computing at Cambridge University in 1957, pursuing coursework in quantum theory with Paul Dirac.  She worked under the supervision of Douglas Hartree, whom she assisted in programming the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC) for atomic-structure calculations. 

She served on the mathematics faculty of the University of British Columbia from 1957 till 1968, where she introduced numerical analysis and computer courses into the curriculum and was instrumental in the formation of the Computer Science Department. Froese Fischer spent 1963-64 at the Harvard College Observatory, where she extended her research on atomic-structure calculations.  While at Harvard, she was the first woman-scientist to be awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship.  In 1991 she became a Fellow of the American Physical Society, in part for her contribution to the discovery of negative calcium.  In 1995 she was elected a member of the Royal Physiographic Society in Lund, in 2004 a foreign member of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences, and in 2015 she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Technology from Malmö University, Sweden. 

Contributions
She is the author of over 300 research articles on computational atomic theory, many of which have had far-reaching impact in the area of atomic-structure calculations.  The early version of the MCHF program, published in the first volume of Computer Physics Communications received two  Citation Classics Awards in 1987.  One of her largest efforts in the field is the recent calculation of the complete lower spectra of the beryllium-like to argon-like isoelectronic sequences, amounting to the publication of data covering 400 journal pages and a total of over 150 ions. 

She is currently an emerita research professor of computer science at Vanderbilt University and a guest scientist of the Atomic Spectroscopy Laboratory at NIST.  She is the widow of Patrick C. Fischer, himself a noted computer scientist and former professor at Vanderbilt. 

References

External links
Personal web page, includes all her scientific work: results, publications, software, etc...
Reminiscences at the end of the century: Biography of herself and a short biography of Douglas Hartree
Page of Charlotte Froese Fischer on the NIST website

Category:1929 births
Category:Living people
Category:Canadian computer scientists
Category:Canadian women scientists
Category:Canadian physicists
Category:Canadian chemists
Category:Canadian mathematicians
Category:Fellows of the American Physical Society
Category:Members of the Royal Physiographic Society in Lund
Category:Canadian women computer scientists
Category:Women mathematicians
Category:Canadian women physicists
Category:Canadian women chemists
Category:20th-century women scientists
Category:Theoretical chemists
Category:Academics in British Columbia
Category:University of British Columbia alumni
Category:University of British Columbia faculty
Category:Harvard University faculty
Category:Vanderbilt University faculty
Category:Canadian expatriate academics in the United States
Category:Canadian people of German descent
Category:Place of birth missing (living people)
Category:Computational chemists
Category:Sloan Research Fellows
Category:People from Chilliwack
Category:Harvard College Observatory people