E. Dorrit Hoffleit papers

Ellen Dorrit Hoffleit was born in Florence, Alabama, on March 12, 1907. She received a B.A. in mathematics (1928) and a Ph.D. in astronomy (1938) from Radcliffe College; and a D.Sc. from Smith College (1984) and from Central Connecticut State University (1998). Hoffleit was a research assistant at the Harvard College Observatory in 1929 and was hired as an astronomer at Harvard in 1948. In 1943, she joined the Ballistic Research Laboratory at Aberdeen Proving Ground to compute missile trajectories. Hoffleit left Harvard in 1956 to run Yale University's star cataloging program. She authored the Bright Star Catalogue, containing information on the 9,110 brightest stars, and co-authored the General Catalogue of Trigonometric Stellar Parallaxes, containing precise distance measurements to 8,112 stars. She retired from Yale in 1975. Hoffleit was also director of the Maria Mitchell Observatory, Nantucket, from 1957 to 1978. In 1988, minor planet 3416 was named "Dorrit"in her honor. Hoffleit died at her New Haven, Connecticut, apartment on April 9, 2007.