Edith Dudley Sylla

Edith Dudley Sylla
August 15, 1941 - May 12, 2023
Hopkinton, New Hampshire - Edith Dudley Sylla, who taught the history of science at N.C. State University for more than four decades and resided in Raleigh from 1968 to 2016, died on May 12th, 2023 in Concord, NH. The cause of death was a neurological disease, progressive supranuclear palsy. She became a professor emerita at NCSU in 2006 and moved to Hopkinton, NH in 2016. Born in Cleveland on August 15, 1941, she spent her early years in Ohio and Illinois. Entering Radcliffe College in 1959, she graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College in 1963, in the first Radcliffe class to receive Harvard degrees.
Edith then entered the Harvard graduate school's PhD program in the History of Science, specializing in late medieval and early modern natural philosophy (aka science) and the history of mathematics. After joining the NCSU faculty in 1968, she completed her doctoral dissertation on the Oxford Calculators, a group of fourteenth-century natural philosophers in 1970, and later published it as a book. Her last book, Quantifying Aristotle, co-edited and with a chapter by her on Leibniz and the Calculators, appeared in 2022. In between, she made a complete translation from Latin to English of Jacob Bernoulli's Ars Conjectandi, a landmark in the history of mathematical probability, published in 2006 as The Art of Conjecturing, as well as writing dozens of journal articles, book chapters, and reviews. During her 41-year career at NCSU, she held visiting professorships at Rutgers, Tel Aviv, MIT, and Nijmegen, and research fellowships at Cornell, the Institute for Advanced Study, and the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology. Noting her passing, the medieval philosophy website In medias PHIL, described her as "one of the central figures in the later twentieth-century flourishing of interest in medieval European science."
In Raleigh, Edith was an active member of the Community United Church of Christ. She also was a member of Judson Memorial Church in New York City, and the First Congregational Church of Hopkinton in New Hampshire where there will be a Memorial Service for her on July 28th, 2023. She spent some of every summer of her life at a family camp on Little Squam Lake, NH, where she loved to swim, boat, watch and listen to the loons, hike in the White Mountains, and enjoy the companionship of five generations of her family.
Edith's ancestors include U.S. senator and Ohio governor Thomas Worthington, called the Father of Ohio Statehood, and Jared Mansfield, surveyor general of the U.S. under President Thomas Jefferson and the first professor of mathematics at West Point. Her remains are to be interred in the Mansfield family plot at Spring Grove Cemetery in Cincinnati.
Edith is survived by her husband, Richard, an NCSU faculty member in Economics, 1968-1990; two daughters; Raleigh resident Anne Sylla and Margaret (Peggy) Padua of Seattle; and six grandchildren.