Hazel Perfect (circa 1927 – 8 July 2015)[1] was a British mathematician specialising in combinatorics.
Perfect was known for inventing gammoids,[2][3][AMG] for her work with Leon Mirsky on doubly stochastic matrices,[4][SP2] for her three books Topics in Geometry,[5][TIG] Topics in Algebra,[6][TIA] and Independence Theory in Combinatorics,[7][ITC] and for her work as a translator (from an earlier German translation) of Pavel Alexandrov's book An Introduction to the Theory of Groups (Hafner, 1959).
[8][ITG] The Perfect–Mirsky conjecture, named after Perfect and Leon Mirsky, concerns the region of the complex plane formed by the eigenvalues of doubly stochastic matrices.
Perfect earned a master's degree through Westfield College (a constituent college for women in the University of London) in 1949, with a thesis on The Reduction of Matrices to Canonical Form.
[10] In the 1950s, Perfect was a lecturer at University College of Swansea; she collaborated with Gordon Petersen, a visitor to Swansea at that time, on their translation of Alexandrov's book.
[11] She completed her Ph.D. at the University of London in 1969; her dissertation was Studies in Transversal Theory with Particular Reference to Independence Structures and Graphs.