Remembering Anneli Cahn Lax (1922–1999)

Individual first meetings and lessons learned

As with most special people, we each remember our first meetings with Anneli. In recounting them, we realized that these meetings were connected to certain lessons we learned from Anneli about working with teachers and sharing ideas with peers.

I (Fernández) met Anneli in 1986 as a student at the Courant Institute. At that time, Anneli had received a grant from the Ford Foundation for a project entitled “Language Linked Approaches to Mathematics”. She was looking for a graduate student to work

Joint experiences working with Anneli

Independent of one another, we each continued our contacts with Anneli in New York. Occasionally, we would visit her at her NYU office. Anneli always had important articles or references to share and projects to discuss. Indeed, we recall that, on our occasional visits to her office, she often wanted to discuss an article that appeared in The Journal of Mathematical Behavior (JMB). At other times, after not receiving an issue in a long while, she worried whether her subscription had lapsed. She

Concluding remarks

In 1995, the MAA awarded Anneli its highest honor: the Yueh-Gin Gung and Dr. Charles Y. Hu Award for Distinguished Service. In relaying her accomplishments, Niven (1995) describes countless activities she was involved in and elaborates on the NML and her Ford-funded mathematical thinking course at NYU. He remarks (in a visionary moment) that many of Anneli's admirers thought the NML should be re-titled “ANML,” Anneli's New Mathematical Library, because of her care in developing and sustaining