Mary Elizabeth Fama (née Duncan; 23 October 1938 – 6 July 2021)[1] was a New Zealand applied mathematician who became "a leading international figure" in the analysis of stress and deformation of rock and the application of this analysis to mining.[2] A method she developed for solving analytically the convergence-confinement curve of a circular mining tunnel has been variously called the Duncan-Fama convergence curve,[3] Duncan-Fama analytical method,[4] or Duncan-Fama solution.[5]
Education and career
After early education at a boarding school in Scotland, Fama became a student at Erskine College, Wellington, where she excelled in mathematics but was stripped of her academic honours after being caught rebelling against the school rules. She went on to earn a bachelor's degree at the University of Canterbury and a second bachelor's degree at the University of Oxford.[1]
Fama was born on 23 October 1938 in Windsor, England, to a Catholic family of five children; her father was a New Zealander, army officer, and government official. They returned to New Zealand when Fama was ten, living in the Wellington region.[1]
In 1968, she met and married Australian psychiatrist Peter Fama, then working in Auckland but slated to return to Australia. Their first child died soon after childbirth, but they had three more in the early 1970s, all three of whom suffered from Friedreich's ataxia, a genetic degenerative disorder, and died in their 20s and 30s.[1]
Fama suffered for many years from pulmonary tuberculosis, likely contracted as a teenager but not diagnosed until much later. By the 1980s she was diagnosed with bronchiectasis. As a complication of her tuberculosis, she went blind in one eye in 2013.[1]
^Oraee, B.; Zandi, S.; Oraee, K. (2013), "a comparison of numerical methods and analytical methods in determination of tunnel walls displacement – a case study", 32nd International Conference on Ground Control in Mining, hdl:1893/16483
^Lü, Qing; Sun, Hong-Yue; Low, Bak Kong (December 2011), "Reliability analysis of ground–support interaction in circular tunnels using the response surface method", International Journal of Rock Mechanics and Mining Sciences, 48 (8): 1329–1343, doi:10.1016/j.ijrmms.2011.09.020
^"Personal notes"(PDF), Mathematical Chronicle, vol. 9, February 1980 – via The Bookshelf (Digitised Texts Collection), University of Auckland Library