Margaret Alice Waugh Maxfield (February 23, 1926 – December 20, 2016)[1][2] was an American mathematician and mathematics book author.
Her dissertation, Fermat's Theorem for Matrices over a Modular Ring, was supervised by Ivan M.
[6] In 1948 she had married John Edward Maxfield, another student at Wisconsin and the University of Oregon who became her frequent collaborator.
[10] By 2011 Maxfield had retired, but was still active in mathematics, and noted to her alumni magazine that she was using Wikipedia to find bibliographic material for her papers.
[11] With John Maxfield, she was also the coauthor of Contemporary Mathematics for General Education: Algebra (Allyn and Bacon, 1963, also with S. Gould Sadler)[7] Abstract Algebra and Solution By Radicals (W. B. Saunders, 1971; reprinted by Dover Books, 1992),[12] Discovering Number Theory (W. B. Saunders, 1972),[13] and Keys to Mathematics (W. B. Saunders, 1973)[14] Maxfield was one of the 1968 winners of the Lester R. Ford Award of the Mathematical Association of America for a paper with her father on the rational approximation of square roots.