[Sci-tech-public] obituary: Irene K. Fischer

[Mike Fischer]

A few of you met my mother in person, more of you knew of her through  
my stories, and others of you in the MIT-Harvard community, science  
studies, or just as my friends may be intrested in her rich web of  
connections to all three.

She passed away Thursday morning after a brief bout of pneumonia.  I  
thought I would share the template of the obituary Susann and I made  
to submit to the Washington Post and Boston Globe.



Irene K. Fischer, mathematician, geodesist, National Academy of  
Engineering Member; Fellow International Geophysical Union, Inductee  
of the National Imaging and Mapping Hall of Fame

  After a brief illness, Irene Kaminka Fischer, 102, passed away in  
Boston, MA on October 22, 2009. Born July 27, 1907 in Vienna, Austria,  
Irene K. Fischer became one of two internationally known women  
scientists in the field of geodesy during the golden age of the  
Mercury and Apollo moon missions. Her Mercury Datum, or Fischer  
Ellipsoid 1960 and 1968, as well as her work on the lunar parallax,  
were instrumental in conducting  these missions.


Born and educated in Vienna, Austria, she studied descriptive and  
projective geometry at the Technical University of Vienna and  
mathematics at the University of Vienna.  Her teachers Moritz Schlick  
and Hans Hahn were among the luminaries of the Vienna Circle; and her  
fellow students included physicist Victor Weiskopf, sociologist Paul  
Lazarsfeld, and social psychologist Marie Jahoda.  Her father, the  
Rabbi Armand/Aaron Kaminka, was head of the Maimonides Institute, and  
regularly led high holiday services at the famed Vienna Musikverein.  
He worked for the Alliance Israelite investigating pogroms in Eastern  
Europe and raised money in the U.S. and Western Europe to help victims.


In 1931 she married historian and geographer, Eric Fischer, who helped  
introduce American, as distinct from British, history to Vienna. The  
Fischer family founded and ran the Vienna Kinderbewahranstallt, the  
first professional kindergarten and kindergarten teacher training  
school in Vienna, a place that also became a refuge for immigrants to  
Vienna from Eastern Europe.



In 1939, the Fischers, with their young daughter, Gay, fled Nazi  
Austria, traveling by rail to Italy, by boat to Palestine and in 1941  
by boat around East Africa and the Cape of Good Hope to Boston where  
they lived with Eric Fischer sister, mother, and brother in law, the  
physician Otto Ehrentheil and their two daughters.  Looking for jobs,  
Irene Fischer first worked as a seamstress’ assistant, then she graded  
blue books for Vassily Leontief at Harvard and for Norbert Wiener at  
MIT. She also worked on stereoscopic projective geometry trajectories  
for John Rule at MIT.  She taught mathematics at Brown and Nichols  
Preparatory School in Cambridge, and then at Sidwell Friends in  
Washington, D.C.



After World War II, and after her son, Michael, born in 1946, had  
reached school age, she found a job at the then Army Map Service in  
Potomac, Md., working under John A. O’Keefe in the Geodesy Branch and  
rising through the ranks to become the chief.  Her twenty-five year  
career at AMS, working on what became the World Geodetic System,  
produced over 120 scientific publications. On the side, she published  
a high school geometry textbook in 1965 one of her many endeavors as  
an educator.  After retiring in 1975, she wrote a memoir of her  
scientific career that was first serialized in the ACSM Bulletin, [an  
official publication of five surveying and mapping professional  
organizations, 2004-06] covering the field of geodesy in the years  
1951-1975, and discussing doing science in a man’s world in a  
government bureaucracy.  It was published as a book in 2005.



Winner of many Federal Government service awards, Fischer was awarded  
an honorary degree by the University of Karlsruhe,  elected to the  
National Academy of Engineering, elected Fellow of the International  
Geophysical Union, and inducted into the National Imaging and Mapping  
Agency (NIMA) Hall of Fame.



She and her family were active for many years at Temple Israel in  
Silver Spring, Md., where she also taught an adult class in basic  
Hebrew, and was an active member of a forty year long chavura  
(discussion group).  When she moved to Rockville, Md., she joined  
Congregation Beth Israel and endowed a Biblical archeology lecture  
series in her husband’s memory at the Rockville Jewish Community  
Center.  In Israel, where many family members live, she and her  
husband endowed fellowships to a technical college.



In 2001 she moved back to Brighton, Mass., three blocks from where she  
had first lived as an immigrant in 1941.  In 2007 she celebrated her  
100th birthday, and her children told the packed and rapt audience of  
her retirement community about her career.

She is survived by her daughter Gay Fischer of Oberlin, Ohio, her son  
Michael M.J. Fischer and daughter –in- law Susann L. Wilkinson of  
Somerville, Mass., and many beloved nephews and nieces, the children  
and grandchildren of her two brothers in Israel, and of her husband’s  
sister in New England.