Margaret Bunting Wyman "Bunnie" Tent

1944 - 2014

FREDERICK, Md. - Margaret Bunting Wyman Tent, mathematics teacher and author, died Saturday, Sept. 20, 2014, at Kline Hospice House, Mt. Airy, from inflammatory breast cancer.

Born Nov. 2, 1944, she was the daughter of the late Raymond and Helen Bunting Cragin Wyman. Bunnie, who was born and grew up in Westfield, and Amherst, Massachusetts, graduated from Amherst Regional High School and Mt. Holyoke College.

In her first career in adult education, Bunnie taught for many years, first in business colleges in Madison, Wisconsin, and in Birmingham, Alabama, and then for two years for the American military in Berlin, Germany. After earning a second bachelor's degree in mathematics education in 1985, she pursued her second career as a middle school mathematics teacher in Birmingham, Alabama.

After publishing several articles on teaching mathematics in professional journals of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, she began researching and writing biographies of great mathematicians, eventually retiring from teaching so that she could write full time. Her biographies of Carl Friedrich Gauss, Emmy Noether, Leonhard Euler and the Bernoullis, and Gottfried Leibniz, all published by AK Peters, are intended for the young adult audience, but have sold well to general readers as well. She self-published a fifth book, a collaboration with her sister-in-law, artist Penny Tent Galpin, telling the story of Bunnie's father's family trip across the United States in 1928.

In 2010, Bunnie moved with her husband and two cats to Frederick, where she intended to continue her writing career in combination with quilting and sewing for her grandchildren, but her writing was cut short with her diagnosis of cancer in 2012.

She is survived by her husband James of 46 years; her son John of Washington, D.C.; her daughter Virginia of Brooklyn, New York; her three grandchildren, Joanna Cragin Tent, Helena Lucia Herrera, and Hugo Nevison Tent; and her two brothers, John C. Wyman of Newton, Massachusetts, and David B. Wyman of Castine, Maine.

A memorial for Bunnie will be held Saturday, Sept. 27, at 2 p.m. in the Delaplaine Room of the National Museum of Civil War Medicine, 48 East Patrick St., Frederick, MD 21705, with a reception to follow. Bunnie will be buried in the Wyman family plot in Blandford, Massachusetts, at a later date.

In lieu of flowers, the family asks that contributions be made to the Farm and Wilderness Camps (farmandwilderness.org).

Arrangements are by Stauffer Funeral Home and Stauffer Crematory, Frederick. Online condolences may be expressed at staufferfuneralhome.com.

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