Iris Mack
Born	(1956-05-17)May 17, 1956 New Orleans, Louisiana
Died	September 27, 2022(2022-09-27) (aged 66)
Alma mater	Vassar College UCLA London Business School Harvard University
Scientific career
Institutions	AT&T Bell Labs MIT University of San Francisco Clark Atlanta University Investment Banque BNP Paribas Enron Harvard Management Company
Thesis	Block implicit one-step methods for solving smooth and discontinuous systems of differential/algebraic equations (1986)

Iris Marie Mack (1956–2022) was an American writer, speaker, and mathematician.

Mack grew up in theCalliope Projects inNew Orleans in a family of ten.^[1] She became interested in space and astrophysics as a teenager and worked as a summer intern at theNASAMichoud Assembly Facility.^[2]Mack attendedVassar College, where she graduated with a double major in mathematics and mathematical physics in 1978.^[3] While an undergraduate she interned at theJet Propulsion Laboratory on the Physical Properties Team for the Mars probeViking program. She attendedUCLA for her master's degree in mathematics and worked as a research fellow atAT&T Bell Labs, where she received a patent for her work withHarrison E. Rowe andRonald V. Schmidt infiber optics.^[4] As aSloan Fellow she attended theLondon Business School and earned an executive MBA. In 1986, she became the second black woman to receive a doctorate inapplied mathematics fromHarvard University.^[5] In 1986 she became the first black woman to teach applied mathematics at theMIT Sloan School of Management. She taught until 1991, teaching courses in financial engineering, statistics, and operations research in addition to applied mathematics.^[1] In 1989 she was a semifinalist for the NASA Astronaut Program.

Mack lectured and consulted onenergy derivatives,quantitative finance andhigh-frequency trading for the Fitch 7City Certificate of Quantitative Finance Program inNew York City,^[6] Fitch 7City Corporate Finance Consulting Group in Singapore^[7] and The Terrapinn Group inSingapore,Hong Kong,Indonesia, andLondon.^[8] In 2010 and 2011 she wrote several articles forHuffPost including "Bob Rubin Just Wants to Be Cuddled" where she describes her relationship withBob Rubin during the2008 financial crisis, while he was chairman and "Senior Counselor" atCitigroup.^[9]

She also served on the boards of theUnited States National Research Council's Transportation Research Board, the Edwin Moses Global Institute, the AlgoAnalytics Trading and Financial Analytics (India), MarketExpress Financial News and Research (India), the Women Mentor Women Foundation and the I Can Still Do That Foundation.^[5]

Mack founded Phat Math Inc. inMiami, Florida in 2003. A few years later in 2007 she and her colleagues at Phat Math launched their prototype mathematics edutainment social network PhatMath.com. Students in grades K-12 and College have access to free 24/7 online math homework help on PhatMath.com, which was named one of the Top 50 Social Sites for Educators and Academics and 25 Useful Networking Sites for Grad Students.^{[by whom?]} As of November 2016, PhatMath.com's website is not functioning.

She has been an astronaut semifinalist,^[5][2] one ofGlamour Magazine's "Top 10" college students,^[5][2] one of Glamour's "Top 10" working women,^[5][2] an investment banker,^[5][2] anEnron Energy Trader^[5][2] and an MIT professor.^[5][2] In addition, she was the second African-American female to earn a doctorate in Applied Mathematics from Harvard.^[5][2] Later she became a mathematics and business school professor, while simultaneously running a consulting firm.^[5] She also lectured at the graduate level on energy trading and risk management at theFreeman School of Business.

• Energy Trading and Risk Management: A Practical Approach to Hedging, Trading and Portfolio Diversification,ISBN 978-1118339336
• Mama says, "Money Doesn't Grow on Trees!",ISBN 978-1413408911
• Mama says, "Money Doesn't Grow on Trees!": World of Dr. Mackamatix Mathematics Edutainment Book,ISBN 978-1456502904
• Convergence analysis of block implicit one-step methods for solving differential/algebraic equations,ISBN 978-1175753960
• Generalized Picard-Lindelf theory,ISBN 978-1178750638

• PhatMath.com

• American business writers
• American women business writers
• Living people
• Vassar College alumni
• 21st-century African-American scientists
• Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences alumni
• London Business School Sloan Fellows
• University of California, Los Angeles alumni
• American women non-fiction writers
• MIT Sloan School of Management faculty
• African-American mathematicians
• African-American women mathematicians
• American women mathematicians
• American women academics
• 21st-century African-American academics
• 21st-century American academics
• 21st-century African-American women
• 20th-century African-American women writers
• 1956 births
• 21st-century African-American women writers

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