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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 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.