Carolina Henriette MacGillavry

MacGillavry (nicknamed "Mac") was born the second of six children in an intellectual family (her father was a brain surgeon, her mother a teacher).

[1] She obtained her Master's degree (cum laude) on March 16, 1932, and continued to work as an assistant to a chemist named A. Smits.

She became a friend of J. M. Bijvoet, and became interested in crystallography which led to her 1937 PhD thesis on the subject, which she completed cum laude with Prof. AHW Aten on 27 January 1937.

She then became an assistant to A. E. van Arkel at Leiden, but Bijvoet asked her to come back to the Amsterdam crystallography laboratory that same year.

[3] In 1986, In the English-speaking world MacGillavry became famous for her book Symmetry aspects of M. C. Escher's periodic drawings on the works of the Dutch graphic artist M. C.