It was an American school - the American Mission Board - that was trying to make itself known in what are now called Third World countries, and Turkey was one of them.

If Madame Curie could do theoretical work, why not me?

All the teachers were retired and replaced by teachers who came from Germany, they were escaping from Hitler. The University was filled 90% with foreign professors. Well-known astronomers also came, and I worked with some of them, like Finlay Freundlich, who, unlike my previous teachers, had done research. With great enthusiasm, I began to work with Freundlich, I learned with him the astrophysics that I did not know and I translated his courses from English to Turkish; meanwhile I perfected my German.

Since 1938 she has been engaged in researches relating to stellar photometry, variable stars, and galactic clusters. As a part-lime assistant in the Milton Bureau, the large undertaking for the systematic study of variable stars, sponsored by the Milton Fund of Harvard University, she is observing changes in the brightness of certain variables and discussing her results. Perhaps the most interesting subject of her present study is the well-known double cluster in the "sword hand" of Perseus, lettered h and Chi Persei. She finds that previous investigators of these clusters have treated them together assuming, as it were, that they are of the nature of twins. This point of view is, in her opinion, questionable. Therefore she is studying the two clusters separately, considering such properties as the luminosity, the variations of mean colour, density, and brightness according to the distance from the centre. She concludes that the assumption of their twin cluster is not sustained, but she adds, "there is need of further observational work on these clusters from the point of view which I emphasise."

Yesterday's program included a talk by Miss Paris Pishmish, a Turkish student from the University of Istanbul working under a Radcliffe fellowship at the Harvard Observatory.

She had beautiful eyes and above all she was very fine and highly educated. At Harvard, where I met her in 1941, I began to realise that the great astronomers Harlow Shapley, Sergi and Cecilia Gaposchkin, and Donald Menzel looked up to her and respected her, as did the physicists Manuel Sandoval Vallarta and Carlos Graef Fernández in Mexico, and of course the astronomers Luis Enrique Erro and Guillermo Haro, great promoters of science in our country.

The staff of the new observatory is headed by the Director Señor Luis Enrique Erro, who was for many years Secretary of the Mexican Embassy in Washington. ... Dr Carlos Graef, the Subdirector, received a part of his scientific training at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where his interest in astronomy naturally led him to study at the Harvard College Observatory. Harvard has also contributed in large measure to the astronomical education of the other two members of the staff: Professor Félix M Recillas, and Mrs Paris Pishmish Recillas, who received her Doctor's degree at the University of Istanbul.

Around 1946 we witnessed the beginning of a golden age for Tonantzintla. The Observatory was finally building a new reputation. Problems related to our galaxy as well as in other galaxies were attacked. Extremely distant high-luminosity stars, high-temperature stars with bright spectral lines, planetary nebulae and galactic nebulae were discovered: all of them accessible from the Tonantzintla sky. The systematic investigation of variable stars of the T-Tauri Type was promoted. The remarkable discovery of the first star flare in Orion was also made. And soon Tonantzintla took the lead in the discovery and study of star bursts in other regions as well. I would like to highlight the remarkable work of Guillermo Haro in these studies. Finally, Erro was reaping the fruit of his hard work after years of uncertainty. It is fair to say that the Schmidt Chamber of Tonantzintla is the one that has given a much higher performance than others of the same type and size.

When my mother left Tonantzintla for the Tacubaya National Astronomical Observatory in 1948, the first astronomy courses began at UNAM. However, she continued her research by observing and using the pool of plates that was increasing at the National Astrophysics Observatory of Tonantzintla. For several years she came for long seasons. On those occasions, my little brother and I accompanied her and ran around the slopes of the Tonantzintla hill, trying not to disturb the sleep of the astronomers who slept during the day to cover her observation shifts at night. Of course, we didn't always manage to stay calm and on more than one occasion we woke up some late-night astronomer!

I personally met Paris Pishmish in Tonantzintla. Her bungalow was the only one planted with flowers. Flowers in the windows, flowers around the walls, flowers in glass jars inside the house. Her look, in fact, was very beautiful because it was intense and because she wanted to encompass everything. She herself was very much like a flower: very well groomed, very coquettish, bathed in dewy water, her nails scrupulously clean, her neatness almost from an operating theatre. She played the piano, sang, and when another sang she immediately sat down at the piano to accompany them, improvising the melody from hearsay. She liked to dance and she did it very well: the gallants took her out and she danced until very late. ... Like Einstein's violin, she was fascinated by music and she said that a scientist should know everything, mainly arpeggios and cadences. Some chamber music ensembles even came to play at her house and she offered them snacks.

Extremely generous with her knowledge, Dr Pishmish gave herself entirely to her students. She was enthusiastic about her classes and took her students to observe Tonantzintla. They slept in the Institute's bungalows, in front of the volcanoes; they participated in their teacher's work, they shared her life for three or four days, and this coexistence confirmed them in their vocation or made them lean towards poetry (which has a lot to do with science).

She contributed, with her studies of stellar populations, to explain the origin of the spiral structure of galaxies by means of density waves. Her most relevant contributions include the discovery of three globular clusters and twenty open clusters. Several of these clusters bear her name. She proposed an explanation for the structure of spiral galaxies and spent a good part of her years studying the motion of stars within clusters and galaxies. She also studied the effect of interstellar absorption of stellar associations on the large-scale distribution of stars in the galaxy. In 1972, Pishmish introduced Fabry-Perot interferometric methods in Mexico to be able to carry out studies of velocity fields of galactic nebulae.

The kinematics of spiral galaxies are reviewed with special emphasis on rotation curves, the flat maxima and undulations of these curves in late types of spirals. The two dimensional velocity fields from the HI21-cm line as well as from optical lines support the finding that the maxima and minima of the rotation correspond reasonably well to arm and interarm regions respectively. It is argued that all galaxies show nuclear activity of some sort. The energetics of the activity cover a very wide range; from the most active QSO's down to "normal" galaxies. NGC4736 is given as an example having mild nuclear activity at its nucleus which gives rise to a tight nuclear spiral. Such cases fall into a class which I call MAGN as against AGN (M stands for mildly). Finally, it is suggested that the morphological sequence of galaxies is essentially fixed by the global parameters with which a galaxy gets started. It appears that two independent initial parameters underlie the morphological sequence of galaxies. One such parameter is the total mass which doubtless is the most important one. The second parameter, unspecified as yet, may be the total kinetic energy or any other parameter. The remaining parameters will be derivable from the two independent ones. This writer believes that the main features both morphological and dynamical are essentially determined by global initial conditions although consequences of interaction between galaxies in some cases cannot be ruled out.

Marie Paris Pishmish passed away on 1 August 1999. Her positive influence turned her into an effective role model, especially for young women. At the time of her death, 25 per cent of the eighty astronomers working at the Institute of Astronomy of the National Autonomous University were women.