Hoffleit, Dorrit, 1907-2007

Ellen Dorrit Hoffleit was born on March 12, 1907, on her parents' farm in Florence, Alabama. Her parents, Fred and Kate Sanio Hoffleit, had emigrated from Germany, and her father worked intermittently as a bookkeeper for the Pennsylvania Railroad. While he preferred farm work, it was not possible to support the family this way, and they relocated from Alabama to New Castle, Pennsylvania. Fred Hoffleit later returned to the farm, while his wife opted to remain in New Castle, judging that the educational opportunities for Hoffleit and her brother Herbert were better there. Hoffleit thus spent most of her early childhood in New Castle, and her interest in astronomy began there, as she would watch the night skies in their back yard with her mother and Herbert. In 1920, Hoffleit and her mother moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, accompanying Herbert, who enrolled at Harvard University.

Hoffleit received her B.A. in mathematics from Radcliffe College in 1928. Her original plan was to teach high school mathematics, but as no jobs in this field were available, she obtained work as a research assistant at the Harvard College Observatory, working on the discovery and light curves of variable stars and earning 40 cents an hour while men doing similar work were paid a dollar an hour. While working at the Observatory, she took graduate courses at Radcliffe, receiving her M.A. and Ph.D. in astronomy in 1932 and 1938, respectively. She was the fifth woman to receive a Ph.D. from Radcliffe and was awarded the Carolyn Wilby Prize for best original work in any department for her dissertation on the determination of spectroscopic absolute magnitudes of southern stars.

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