I knew German from the time I was four; I grew up in a German church. German wasn't talked at home because my father didn't want that.

The first and only thing I ever failed in school was the first quarter of algebra. And I know why, now ... But I could be docile and learn roles, so I passed the second quarter with a 95.

"Ability in a man is knowledge." Because she was one "to strive, to seek, to find and not to yield," Marguerite received the first letter of the alphabet as a steady academic diet. The same principle inspired her work on Kalends [the College student publication] and enabled her to take a vigorous part in class athletics.

... she had planned to continue her studies at Johns Hopkins University "until an instance of Dr Bacon's unceasing interest in the careers of all her students changed that plan more radically than she (I think!) or I foresaw". Bacon suggested she apply for a position at Bryn Mawr College as an assistant to Charlotte Scott.

The quintic with five cusps (characterised by the Plücker numbers $m = n = \kappa = i = 5; \nu = \tau = 0; \rho = 1$) has been considered by del Pezzo, Field and Basset. Field gives a general descriptive account of the appearance of the curve under various conditions on the coefficients in its equation; Basset mentions it as the limiting case under quintics with five nodes; but neither paper gives a detailed study of the curve. In such a study the del Pezzo work is fundamental. Starting with the fact that a quintic with five cusps may be obtained by quadratic transformation from a quartic with two cusps, in- and circumscribed to the triangle of reference, he proves that the quintic is uniquely determined by its five cusps.
...
In the present investigation, which takes as starting point the del Pezzo work, it is proved that if five points in the plane are given as cusps on a quintic, the curve thus uniquely determined is unipartite, with the five cusps and five inflexions occurring alternately. Moreover, it is shown that from the five given points the cuspidal tangents, the inflexions, the inflexional tangents, as well as a series of ordinary points on the quintic, may be obtained by linear constructions.

Marguerite Lehr and a friend motored through the centre of France down the Riviera to Rome, up through Sienna and Assisi to Switzerland, through Rothenburg, Heidelberg, etc., to Belgium and back to Havre.

Only at Bryn Mawr, with its full graduate school, would a woman of my generation, in mathematics, have had graduate level courses to give, from the first - regardless of rank. My engagement was with mathematics, not 'teaching,' consequently I refused any and all feelers in administration or editing in spite of slow promotion! But the choice was mine - I wanted the full range of thought, live, not text-book concerns.

I just found your post card of 26 March 1942 in my 'unanswered' clip, and am sending you a note about my latest experience - quite exciting and rather challenging. Under the Engineering, Science, and Management War Training program a course in maps from aerial photographs (properly called photogrammetry, I gather!) was established this summer, on the Bryn Mawr campus under the direction of three geologists and me ... and on my side I put in three incredibly packed weeks, teaching each of two sections three hours math a day, to cover a kind of minimum set of notions which underlie mapping problems. The class of 40 ran from 17 to 58 in age; from high school youngsters whose pencils dripped trigonometry to Commercial artists who shivered at the thought of algebra - but did they work! And did I learn a lot!

Descriptive statistics; distributions; mean values; dispersion; elements of probability, of sampling, and of time series. The necessary mathematics is developed in the course.

The syllabus contained a brief introduction and a two-hundred word section for each week, with abstract and three references selected to offer wide range of treatment, and as much further bibliography as possible in the strict text or treatise sense. Any one sending for the syllabus was already interested in at least one of the ten subjects; the abstracts were therefore intended to catch attention by questions raised, while the range of reference would (I hoped) reassure and serve a more informed reader. This was one device for coping with the unknown spread of mathematical sophistication in the potential audience.

Most people associate mathematics with getting answers or giving proofs, and it is easy to see why. Mathematics does set up good rules for getting quick answers, and does accumulate good reasons for trusting those rules. But the life of the enterprise is inquiry; as we learn how to ask good questions, answers come, and often more powerfully than when we strain for them. So these talks are concerned with raising questions - questions of practical import or pure curiosity - questions about number, space, pattern, logic, which mathematicians know have paid off in increasing our comprehension of the world we live in. You are wrong if you think questions of this kind are special, technical, occurring only to a few gifted people. Almost every small child does things, and asks about things, which touch such mathematical sides of experience. He may be hoping for a rule (what to do); he may be groping for a reason (why it works); mathematics itself swings between rules and reasons. In these talks, children's casual remarks will often be used, for illumination or to surprise you into an attitude of observant curiosity. Even the dictionary, under "mathematic - fr. Greek" gives first mathematikos - disposed to learn, and only second mathemata - things learned.

Able scholar and inspiring teacher, cherishing the best in classical education but not afraid to explore and utilise new ideas and methods, you have made notable contributions to education not only by helping others to understand the nature of mathematics and its role in the modern world, but also by demonstrating and explaining the discipline of scholarship and its intrinsic values.

Marguerite Lehr has added another to her long list of outstanding achievements. This time she was loaned by Bryn Mawr College to give short courses for advanced students of exceptional ability in other colleges. Last fall she was a visiting professor at New England colleges, and on March 15 she started on a trip to some 15 colleges in the mid-west.

... in recognition of her brilliance as a teacher, for which generations of students will remember her.

... attempts at translation from French, German, Italian ... upholstering and other house projects (some of which do oddly have a math side, too), I'm not a bad carpenter and [love] gardening in Maine.

Once a woman asked me, "Are you a mathematician?" The big words, I think, belong to the big things. So I said, "No, but I spend most of my waking hours thinking about mathematics, and sometimes sleeping hours too." I didn't know Paul Levy was at my shoulder. He said in his nice French, "But you know very well what mathematics is ... You do the dance called 'thinking' in front of them. And they learn. They don't all learn the same thing, but that doesn't matter." He looked puzzled, and then he exclaimed, "Ah, the little articles! All those little articles!"

In 1968, the year after she retired, Lehr was living in Salisbury, Maryland, where her sister Charlotte had been living until her death after a lengthy illness in August 1967. In May 1971 Lehr reported to Bryn Mawr from Baltimore that "I am gone from Salisbury a great deal." Part of that time is likely to have been in Manset on Mount Desert Island in Maine, which she described for her 1954 article in the Bryn Mawr Alumnae Bulletin, as "next to Mathematics, her greatest obsession." In November 1972, Marguerite Lehr moved from Salisbury back to Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.