Marcia Ascher

Marcia Alper Ascher (April 23, 1935 – August 10, 2013) was an American mathematician, and a leader and pioneer in ethnomathematics.

[2][3] Ascher was born in New York City, the daughter of a glazier and a secretary.

[2][4] They both became graduate students at the University of California, Los Angeles;[4] she completed a master's degree in 1960,[2] and moved with her husband to Ithaca, New York, where he had found a faculty position at Cornell University.

[5][3] With her husband, Ascher co-authored the book Code of the Quipu: A Study in Media, Mathematics, and Culture (University of Michigan Press, 1981); it was republished in 1997 by Dover Books as Mathematics of the Incas: Code of the Quipu.

[6] She was also the sole author of two more books on ethnomathematics, Ethnomathematics: A Multicultural View of Mathematical Ideas (Brooks/Cole, 1991)[7] and Mathematics Elsewhere: An Exploration of Ideas across Cultures (Princeton University Press, 2002).