Haya Freedman was a member of the Sub-Department of Mathematics, (as it was then), at LSE for many years until her retirement in 1989. She carried out research in abstract algebra.

Her funeral took place on 29th July (a private family-only occasion).

Haya Freedman was born in Lvov (then in Poland) in 1923. She moved to Israel (then Palestine) in 1933 where she completed her education obtaining an M.Sc. from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Her degree thesis in abstract algebra was written under the supervision of. Dr. J. Levitzki. She married a mathematical colleague, Arye, in 1948, moved to England in 1956 and did her Ph.D. at Queen Mary College under Prof. K. Hirsch. She took up a post in the Mathematics Department at Birkbeck College in 1965. When the late Professor Cyril Offord was invited to set up a Mathematics sub-department at LSE in 1966 Haya Freedman joined him here in 1967. She was thus a member of our department from its inception.

Haya's published research was in the general area of ring theory. She touched on subjects like torsion-free rings, the ring of endomorphisms of an Abelian group and its relation to the automorphism group.

She is remembered as an exceptionally gifted teacher. This was based on an uncanny ability to evaluate the qualities of a student, which talents were also used in admissions interviews (even to the Economics Department!). Haya developed a teaching method that made the students much more active participants in the learning process. This was achieved through seminars in which students explained to their colleagues original papers in mathematics. In the days of the BSc (Econ) degree at LSE, when the Department of Statistics and Mathematical Science offered a Mathematics degree, her third year course included an examinable project (in Algebra). Projects were selected by her according to student ability. She had quite a reputation for making mathematicians out of the talented students and many would say that the best way of obtaining a first class degree was to be a tutee of Haya's. These included a series of very good students indeed (some of whom had switched from Economics to Mathematics), with at least one getting the University of London Prize in Mathematics, if memory serves me correctly. One example of Haya's mentoring is Norman Fenton who is now Professor of Computer Science at Queen Mary, University of London. Others of her former students also teach mathematics at universities both in this country and in the U.S.A., while others now work in less obvious professions, such as Law.

She is remembered by her colleagues also outside of the formal life of the Department for her often remarkable gestures of great kindness.

She leaves behind her husband Arye and two daughters Daphne and Josephine, and will be greatly missed.

Adam Ostaszewski
Senior Lecturer
Department of Mathematics
LSE.

Memories of Haya

We welcome in the section below contributions from colleagues and past students to offer memories of Haya. In doing so we realize that we are, indirectly, recording moments of the history of a department that is just months short of being 40 years in existence. In paying tribute to Haya one is almost involuntarily led to reflect that when we grieve the passing of a colleague, we grieve also the very passage of time, in which we are all carried.

Here is a poem on this very theme by Gerald Manley Hopkins entitled Spring and Fall. It is directed to a young child, who apparently asks why autumn unfolds.

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What héart héard of, ghóst guéssed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

HAYA FREEDMAN

I was appointed to a lectureship in mathematics at LSE a few years after the department was founded under the leadership of Cyril Offord. It was not easy at first to attract students to our new mathematics degree in sufficient numbers to make it viable, but the students who came to us really wanted to learn. Haya understood this from the beginning and taught the rest of us what such students are capable of achieving with teachers who care as deeply as she did about their subject.

Now she is gone, I can tell a story that says a great deal about what kind of person she was. While I was acting as chairman during the interregnum that followed Cyril Offord's retirement. I put it to her that she deserved promotion to Senior Lecturer, but she argued determinedly to the contrary. Eventually she reluctantly agreed to her name being put forward---but only on the condition that I said nothing whatever on the subject to anyone who didn't absolutely need to know.

I guess the word that describes Haya best is integrity - both personal and intellectual. The world would be a better place if more of us were able to follow her example.

Ken Binmore
Emeritus Professor
Department of Economics
University College London

HAYA FREEDMAN

There was always something appealingly maternal about Haya. Conjoined with a disarming lack of worldliness, yet underpinned by a certain stubborness - these qualities made her the unique person she was. While her devotion to her students brought out the best in them, she was no pushover, for her apparent naivete was balanced by a shrewdness of judgment concerning her charges' abilities. I recall several occasions on which she remarked to me that student X, although highly regarded, was "not all that good". She was serious, dedicated, and kind, a mathematician and teacher hailing from what is, sadly but inevitably, a bygone age. I recall her with genuine affection.

Professor John L. Bell
Department of Philosophy
University of Western Ontario
London, Ontario
Canada N6A 3K7