Judith Donovan was born to Dr. and Mrs. Edward J. Donovan in Manhattan, New York on March 23, 1937.[3][4] She finished high school at the Convent of Sacred Heart in New York and pursued her undergraduate studies at Barnard College, earning her bachelor's degree in 1958.[3] After graduating from Barnard, she began graduate studies in mathematics at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts.[3] At Brandeis, she met Paul J. Sally, Jr, who was in the doctoral program in mathematics at Brandeis.[5] Judith and Paul were married in November 1959, while Paul was still in graduate school.[3] In 1960, Judith Sally was awarded a master's degree in mathematics from Brandeis.[6] Judith and Paul had three sons, David, Stephen, and Paul III, while Paul was completing his dissertation and consequently, Judith postponed her doctoral studies.[3] Paul completed his Ph.D. at Brandeis in 1965 and joined the faculty at the University of Chicago that same year.[3]
In 1968, Sally entered the doctoral program in mathematics at Chicago.[2][7] In 1971, she was awarded her Ph.D. in mathematics from University of Chicago.[2] Her thesis "Regular Overrings of Regular Local Rings" was supervised by Irving Kaplansky.[8]
Sally was an accomplished runner, completing several Chicago Marathons, as well as many shorter races, where she often finished first in her age group.[3] She died in Chicago on January 28, 2024, at the age of 86.[3][9]
Sally also wrote a research monograph Number of generators of ideals in rings that was published by Marcel Dekker in 1978,[11] and translated Jean Dieudonné's Cours de géométrie algébrique into English as History of algebraic geometry.[12] She published several books on mathematics education with her husband, Paul Sally.[7] Her interest in mathematical pedagogy also led to teaching mathematics courses at the University of Chicago for historically underrepresented groups and geometry courses for elementary school teachers.[3]
Selected publications
Sally, Judith (1978). Numbers of generators of ideals in local rings. New York: M. Dekker. ISBN0-8247-6645-8. MR0485852.
Sally, Judith D. (1977). "On the associated graded ring of a local Cohen-Macaulay ring". J. Math. Kyoto Univ. 17 (1): 19–21. MR0943272.
Huneke, Craig; Sally, Judith D. (1988). "Birational extensions in dimension two and integrally closed ideals". J. Algebra. 115 (2): 481–500. doi:10.1016/0021-8693(88)90274-8. MR0943272.
Sally, Judith; Sally, Paul (2003). Trimathlon: A Workout Beyond the School Curriculum. AK Peters, Ltd. ISBN978-1-56881-184-0.
Sally, Judith D.; Sally, Paul J. (2007). Roots to Research: A Vertical Development of Mathematical Problems. Providence: American Mathematical Society. ISBN978-0-8218-4403-8. MR2359908.
