Wichita State was the academic home of Jeneva “Jenna” J. Brewer ’46/49, WSU associate professor emeritus of mathematics and statistics, for some 46 years.
Brewer went to Wakeeney, Kan., high school and in 1942 moved with her parents to Wichita, where she enrolled at the University of Wichita and decided on a double major: zooology-botany and mathematics.
After her college graduation, she taught high school math for a year before returning to wu on a fellowship in 1947. In 1949 she was awarded a master’s degree in mathematics and a full-time job in the WU math department.
The young mathematician was an athlete who played on basketball and softball teams sponsored by local companies. A 1953 newspaper article quoted her answering the question How does your math tie in with baseball? this way: “I just tell people that whenever I see a hard grounder approaching, I whip out a pad of paper and a pencil, wet my finger and check the wind velocity, figure the ball’s weight, compute the curvature, gravity pull, velocity and resistance and then take up my position and wait.”
While computational expertise played little in her abilities as a left-fielder, Brewer did use her math skills to help build a 32-by-40 foot cabin and design a three-slip enclosed boat dock for her pontoon boat and runabouts on her waterfront property at Grand Lake in Oklahoma.
Jeneva Joy Brewer died Oct. 3, 2008, in Wichita.
