Will Giugite Straus kindly make her algebra more comprehensible, so that 3A can do last night's homework, please.

Academically we're tops with Giugite Straus in the vicinity of 86%.

Giugite is from Paris, France, and is now at University College studying Mathematics and Physics.

The girl who had just emerged from her teens found the notion of teaching at such a prestigious institution a tad overwhelming.

... acquired a god-like stature and gained a reputation as an intimidating figure.

As one of only two women graduate students at Harvard's Mathematics Department, Marguerite felt heightened pressure to measure up. She was among the best of the best and the competition was stiff. It was not enough to be brilliant when her classmates, as brilliant as she, were competing feverishly in an unrelenting effort to outdo each other. She could not muster up the will to compete head to head with these strivers. The young woman was not yet prepared to focus on mathematics to the exclusion of all else.

A doctoral student's relationship with his or her supervisor may make or break a budding career. The chemistry between Zariski and his student was not going well. She found him to be brilliant, but aloof and inaccessible. It was not so much what he said, but it was what he did not say. It was not so much his words, but his demeanour. Marguerite sensed a grudging tolerance and disparagement in his glance, and she seemed to freeze in his presence. She completed a Master's Dissertation and received her Master's Degree from Harvard, but felt stymied after three years in Cambridge.

... found herself at loose ends on campus with no definite plans for her own studies. Although she considered herself a "failure" at mathematics, her affinity for the science remained. She found herself reading several of Emmy Noether's papers on ring theory and jotting down notes about them.

Believing that her work might have some value, she decided to speak to someone in Chicago's Mathematics Department about it. A cursory glance at the University Directory produced the familiar name, Adrian Albert. Marguerite felt sure he would understand both Noether's work and her own. She phoned for an appointment with Professor Albert and he agreed to meet with the timid young woman.

When she arrived in his office, Professor Albert sat at his desk, smoking his pipe. To him, the student with a French accent was a nobody who had dropped in out of the blue. Marguerite introduced herself, but glossed over her previous education. The professor did not press for more information. He glanced at her notes, scarcely looking at her while remaining focussed on his pipe. He was not impressed with the work but did not appear dismissive either. "At least he's neutral," she thought, feeling somewhat relieved.

Marguerite was struck with the contrast with her former supervisor. Professor Albert impressed her as approachable, gentle, nonaggressive, and not at all authoritarian. Not wishing to raise expectations by letting him know that Brauer considered her a 'wunderkind', she was content to leave the subject of her past academic accomplishments alone. There was nothing to pique his interest in the student, but he was kind and generous by nature. He handed her a stack of reprints and volunteered, "Well, why don't you take a look at some of my recent papers and come back and see me in a month?"

Marguerite read over the papers and took to them as a duck takes to water. She was intrigued by Adrian's work in nonconventional structures. The absentee Harvard student returned in a month feeling a sense of weightlessness and armed with a determination to seek him as her doctoral thesis advisor.

The pipe-smoking professor appeared rather surprised to learn that the young nobody had fully understood his work. He insisted that she at least register with the University as a "reader" in the Mathematics Department if she wished to work with him. Then he assigned a problem for her dissertation - finding the derivation algebra of one of the noncommutative algebras he had defined.

It was clear he did not take her seriously. One day, Marguerite appeared in his office and announced that her name was no longer Straus, as she had just married a man with the surname, Frank. Adrian looked at her in disbelief until she withdrew her hand from the pocket of her raincoat and displayed her wedding ring.

Marguerite dispatched her dissertation problem within a matter of weeks. ... Marguerite wrote out the solution in longhand and brought it to Professor Albert's office.

Adrian took her paper and read it over. He suddenly looked up from his pipe and gazed at the petite personage in front of him as if seeing her for the first time. Marguerite had discovered a brand new class of simple Lie algebras. Prior to her result, only one infinite class of simple Lie algebras was known, the class discovered in 1937 by Emmy Noether's former doctoral student, Ernst Witt. Professor Albert could barely contain his excitement about her discovery.

For the first time, he quizzed the young woman about her previous education. Once he learned that Marguerite had studied under Brauer and Zariski, her achievement made sense to him. He was so impressed with her findings, he immediately arranged for her work to be published in the prestigious 'Proceedings' of the National Academy of Sciences.

The author wishes to acknowledge her debt to A A Albert for suggestions leading to the fairly simple proofs presented here.

The authors reveal several new infinite classes of simple Lie algebras of characteristic $p > 2$ which appear as subalgebras of the Witt algebras of derivations of certain polynomial algebras, and they also develop a general multiplication table method for constructing Lie algebras of characteristic $p$ out of $p$-groups, linear, and bilinear functions. The latter algebras or, in certain cases, homomorphic images or subalgebras of homomorphic images of them turn out to be simple.

The new simple derivation algebras, in addition to the Witt algebras and the class recently described by the second author, comprise two infinite classes of algebras with dimensions $(n - 1)p^{n}$ and $p^{2n} - 2$. The new simple algebras which are specified by basis products fall into three infinite classes of dimensions $p^{n}, p^{n} - 1, p^{n} - 2$.

I talked about attempting to progress from linear programming to concave programming with Philip Wolfe. He had an office, but I was working at home and remember regularly coming in to see Phil saying "This should work." One time Harold Kuhn came by and Phil Wolfe said to him "I think Marguerite has solved the Quadratic Problem." Then he said, "but you didn't prove that your method converges." He then promptly showed that it did converge and then we wrote the paper.

The 1956 paper introduced the famous Frank-Wolfe algorithm (also known as conditional gradient), and was the very first method for general constrained convex optimisation. The importance of the method can hardly be emphasised enough, as it marks a historical tipping point enabling the departure from linear programming, going to more general convex optimisation. The paper is still of great significance today, as it paved the way for various currently important and broadly used optimisation algorithms, in particular sparse methods in signal processing and machine learning (including matching pursuit, Lasso and related techniques).

After that I really didn't give up, I went back to Lie algebras but it did help me professionally in the sense that I was a wife and a mother and the question of jobs is very problematic for women as we all know because of full time work etc. The optimisation helped me get jobs because it was easier to be employed in business schools or engineering schools with the claim that I knew something about optimising. This is what happened. I worked in transportation. I have a few articles in transportation science which is all based on equilibriums.

My wife, Marguerite Frank, a professional and published mathematician and a discerning and avid critic of literature as well, has been a sharp and discerning critic of all of my volumes. Through these many years she has helped me to maintain them as close as possible to the highest intellectual and literary standards. In this instance she was dissatisfied with my treatment of perhaps the most complex of all the female characters in Dostoevsky's novels, the beautiful and ill-fated Nastasya Filippovna of 'The Idiot'. In the past, I had always used her comments to guide my own revisions. But now she so much altered and enriched my own initial view that I asked her to express them herself; and the pages devoted to Nastasya Filippovna in the present book thus come from her pen. Let me conclude by citing what I wrote in the Preface to my fifth volume: "Nothing I can say will adequately express what every one of my books owes to her participation."

Its good to have people working from different fields, its nice to have a general culture in mathematics and know about other fields.