Dr. Elizabeth Helly

• Mathematics
• Knowledge, attitudes, practice

I had no interest in science whatsoever until my junior year in high school, when I met Dr. Elizabeth Helly. I was the first to arrive at her physics classroom, and she was talking to herself as she erased the blackboard covered with equations, “Ach, gee, how I hate to erase my beloved math.” It was love at first sight. This ancient lady was bent, hobbled, and hunched at every connection. (It was only much later we were told that she was a refugee who had escaped the Nazis just in time and that the rest of her family had not been so lucky.)

Dr. Helly spoke with a thick German accent, her conversations liberally laced with malapropisms and misplaced idioms: “There you have …