Anne C. Morel facts for kids

Anne C. Morel (also known as Anne C. Davis) was an American mathematician. She was born in 1984. She was famous for her work in logic, order theory, and algebra. She made history at the University of Washington. She was the first woman to become a full professor of mathematics there.

Her Journey in Math

Morel finished her studies at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1941. She started her advanced math studies at the University of California, Berkeley in 1942. But she paused her studies to help during World War II. She joined the WAVES, which was the United States Naval Women's Reserve.

After the war, she returned to Berkeley in 1946. She earned her Ph.D. in 1953. Her main teacher was Alfred Tarski. Her special study was about A Study in the Arithmetic of Order Types. This work looked at how ordinal numbers are put in order.

After finishing her Ph.D., Morel worked as a professor. She spent two years at Berkeley. She also worked at the University of California, Davis. From 1959 to 1960, she was at the Institute for Advanced Study.

In 1960, she joined the math team at the University of Washington. By 1961, she became a tenured associate professor. Later, she became the first female full professor of mathematics there. For many years, she was the only woman professor in the math department.

What She Discovered in Math

Morel made several important contributions to mathematics.

In 1952, as part of her Ph.D. work, she found something interesting. She discovered two different countable ordinal numbers. These numbers had the same "square" when using ordinal arithmetic. Later, Wacław Sierpiński helped simplify her idea. They published this discovery together.

In 1955, Morel wrote about a special math idea. It was related to the Knaster–Tarski theorem. She showed that if a math structure is "incomplete," it has a certain kind of function. This function would not have a fixed point.

A very important paper came out in 1965. Morel wrote it with Thomas Frayne and Dana Scott. It was called "Reduced direct products." This paper explained key ideas for reduced products in model theory. These ideas were very useful. Many important uses of these definitions were found even before the paper was published. People called it a "classical reference paper."

Morel also worked with her teacher, Alfred Tarski. They wrote a short paper together. It was about using reduced products. This work helped with the compactness theorem in mathematical logic. It showed how to prove the compactness theorem using ultraproducts.

With Chen Chung Chang, she also used reduced products. They showed that a rule from Alfred Horn was not always true. Horn's rule was about when properties stay the same in direct products. Morel and Chang showed it wasn't always a necessary condition.

Later in her career, Morel studied other math topics. These included group theory, semigroups, and cofinality in universal algebra. Her last paper was published after she passed away. It was titled "Cofinality of algebras" (1986).

Her Life Outside Math

During her time in the WAVES, Anne met Alan Davis, who was also a mathematician. They got married. However, their marriage ended in 1955.

In 1957, she married Delos Morel, who was a lawyer. They had two daughters. Their names were Jeanne (born in 1958) and Verena (born in 1962, who passed away in 2002).

Anne C. Morel passed away on July 22, 1984. Her husband, Delos, became a Chief Administrative Law Judge. He passed away in 2008.