Laurie E. Bass

Laurie E. Bass brought rigorous mathematics to New York's Fieldston School students for 43 years. “I love being able to take something that a textbook makes static, but make it come alive”—that is perhaps Bass’ mantra as a mathematician. Ironically, she spent twenty years as an author of geometry textbooks at Prentice Hall (now called Savvas). She considered it an opportunity to make geometry more accessible to a national community of students. Even there, Bass found a way to add nuance and creativity to a notoriously dimensionless genre of literature; for a summer, she worked on incorporating fun applications with the newly invented TI Nspire into her textbooks. She would call her partner in California every day to describe to her the activity she had mapped out and what its objective was. Her partner would then translate that into TI commands. “I was just always looking for ways to make it come alive for kids,” she said. June 16, 2022, was her last day as a teacher at Fieldston, but far from her last as a mathematician.

Source: The Fieldston News