Remembering Sarah Seastone

March 24th, 2009
by jodi
Sarah Seastone circa 2003

Sarah Seastone circa 2003

I never met her, but she was part of my life for almost a decade.

Sarah Seastone was the editor, archivist, and Web designer for the Math Forum. She helped numerous teachers create early webpages about topics like tessellations and fractals, and taught many of them about the Web. Here’s a definition she gave of the Web.

Sarah was a great encouragement to me when I started answering questions for Dr. Math, as an undergraduate in the mid 90’s. She always knew lots of resources, and was always happy to share them. A thread about women in math is typical. While I pressed “send”, Sarah contributed ideas. She knew and kept track of resources throughout the world.

Sarah was one of the first people I knew who really knew how to search the Web. Just about everything in the Dr. Math archives of that era was culled by Sarah as worth saving. As Dr. Math’s archivist, she must have read through a lot of the email sent by the project.

She also wrote many, many archived Dr. Math answers herself.

I knew her through email, sarah@forum.swarthmore.edu, and am sad to say I never met her in person.

Sarah Seastone Fought, circa 1965

Sarah Seastone circa 1965

Images from http://mathforum.org/~sarah/ and http://www.hemlockgorge.org/hgs65/HGSTeachers.htm

Part of Ada Lovelace Day 2009. Read about more women in technology.

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Posted in library and information science | Comments (2)

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  • Elise says:

    Thank you, Jodi, for these kind words about my Mom, Sarah. I’m not sure how I missed this three years ago but I searched online on a whim today and this popped up. It’s good to see she made such an impact. I can tell you she was a complicated person with a lot of ambivalence about math, and she would have been really touched by your blog. I think I remember her talking about you a couple of times and enjoying correspondence.

    It’s also entertaining to me to see you knew her by her maiden name, though she never legally changed it back after divorcing in 1973. I know she wanted to, but couldn’t quite navigate the legal hoops to get there, and didn’t want to spend the money. I hope your life is going well,

    Elise.