ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, November 26, 1996 TAG: 9611260060
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: BETH MACY
SOURCE: BETH MACY
This is for all you math dolts out there who don't know which is larger: 3/5 or 2/3. (After 10 minutes of scribbling, I finally figured it out - it's 2/3.)
This is for all of us who'd like to live to the ripe old age of 88 - and still be able to swim a mile twice a week, to paint landscapes, to write an average of six letters a day, to research and author complex, cutting-edge articles with such titles as ``On the Zeckendorf Form of F/F.''
Whatever that is.
This is about Friendship Manor resident Herta Freitag, the Hollins College mathematics professor emeritus who - trust me - is even more remarkable than I am about to describe.
As a 12-year-old student in Vienna, Austria, she discovered the wonders of mathematics, noting in her diary that it was not about memorization but about ``thinking problems out.''
As a 30-year-old teacher, she left Vienna just as Hitler's troops were taking over, fleeing to England where she worked as a housekeeper until she could afford a freighter ticket to the United States.
As a 45-year-old American immigrant, she earned her doctorate in mathematics at Columbia University.
As a 54-year-old Hollins math professor, she became a scholar of Fibonacci, the 13th-century mathematician and traveling salesman - who heralded the replacement of the old Roman numeral system with the Hindu-invented system of numbers we use today.
And as a retired octogenarian - she can't remember exactly which year it was - Freitag was so busy ``thinking problems out'' that she discovered something new about the famed Fibonacci Sequence. Her published research was eventually used in the hot area of cryptography, or decoding secret messages.
If I explained to you how she did it, I'd have to kill you. Fortunately for us both, I can't figure it out. As Freitag says in her still-thick Austrian accent, ``Tis too complicated to tell.''
Suffice it to say, Freitag is still thinking problems out - a fact that thrills people who understand complex mathematics.
Last summer, at the age of 88, she delivered three papers in Austria, at the biannual International Conference of the Fibonacci Association, which brings together mathematicians from across the globe.
For her contributions to the field, the Fibonacci Quarterly dedicated this month's issue to her.
Her photograph is lodged among such groundbreaking research articles as ``Algorithmic Manipulation of Third-Order Linear Recurrences'' and ``Average Number of Nodes in Binary Decision Diagrams of Fibonacci Functions.''
This is the stuff Freitag spends her ``breakfast, lunch, dinner'' thinking about. Sitting at the living-room desk that is both her eating, writing and problem-solving place, she says: ``I must confess, this is where I am every spare minute, dabbling around in mathematics.
``I am not interested in the applications of my work,'' she says, referring to the top-secret CIA-type stuff. ``Only that they exist.''
Gerald Bergum, the mathematician and computer scientist who edits the journal, describes Freitag as a scholar who soared through the glass ceiling of mathematics - long before such a term existed.
``The desire she has to learn at her age and to present her ideas is tremendous,'' Bergum said from his home in Brookings, S.D. ``She is the ideal role model for all women: If you try hard, you can do anything in spite of the obstacles.''
Also: If you love what you do, it never feels like work.
Freitag approaches everything she does with such passion: The Jumble puzzle in the newspaper, the synchronized-swimming Christmas pageant she participates in every year, the guest lecture she gives every Thanksgiving in Savannah, Ga. - even the cover of the Friendship Manor newsletter she designs each month.
She does not watch television.
The widow corresponds regularly with a handful of the top mathematicians in the world - her ``mathematical boyfriends,'' she calls them. They co-write papers, check each other's research, share personal news.
She is problem-solving proof of the old adage: Use it or lose it.
As Bergum says, ``The way she uses her brain is what makes you worship her. When you see how she loves math, you can't help but love math - and her, too.''
LENGTH: Medium: 81 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: (headshot) Herta Freitagby CNB