Marcia Alper Ascher (April 23, 1935 – August 10, 2013) was an American mathematician, and a leader and pioneer in ethnomathematics.[1] She was a professor emerita of mathematics at Ithaca College.[2][3]
Ascher was born in New York City, the daughter of a glazier and a secretary. She graduated from Queens College, City University of New York in 1956,[2] and married Robert Ascher, an anthropologist graduating from Queens College in the same year.[2][4]
They both became graduate students at the University of California, Los Angeles;[4] she completed a master's degree in 1960,[2] and moved with her husband to Ithaca, New York, where he had found a faculty position at Cornell University.[4]
She joined the mathematics department at Ithaca College in 1960, as one of the founders of the department.[1][3] She retired as full professor emerita in 1995.[1][2]
With her husband, Ascher co-authored the book Code of the Quipu: A Study in Media, Mathematics, and Culture (University of Michigan Press, 1981); it was republished in 1997 by Dover Books as Mathematics of the Incas: Code of the Quipu.[6] She was also the sole author of two more books on ethnomathematics, Ethnomathematics: A Multicultural View of Mathematical Ideas (Brooks/Cole, 1991)[7] and Mathematics Elsewhere: An Exploration of Ideas across Cultures (Princeton University Press, 2002).[8] The Basic Library List Committee of the Mathematical Association of America has recommended the inclusion of all three books in undergraduate mathematics libraries.[9] Mathematics Elsewhere won an honorable mention in the 2002 PROSE Awards in the mathematics and statistics category.[10]
