Early life and education
Sue Lorch was born on November 14, 1951, in Chicago, Illinois, United States, and raised in Elmhurst, Illinois, a western suburb of Chicago. Her father, Lee Lorch, was also a mathematician and taught at Roosevelt University in Chicago. Lorch enrolled at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1969 and graduated summa cum laude in 1973 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Mathematics and a minor in Computer Science.
Lorch completed her Ph.D. at Rutgers University in 1977, under the supervision of Gian-Carlo Rota. Her doctoral dissertation was entitled Combinatorial Matrices.
Academic career
After receiving her Ph.D., Lorch became a C. L. E. Moore instructor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, followed by a term as a visiting member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1978–79. She then taught briefly at Columbia University.
In 1980, Lorch joined the faculty of Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, as an assistant professor of mathematics. She was promoted to associate professor in 1984 and full professor in 1989. She served as chair of the mathematics department from 1995 to 1998 and again from 2004 to 2007.
Lorch's research interests included graph theory, combinatorial matrix theory, and combinatorics. She published over 50 research articles and two books: Spectral Graph Theory (with Jonathon L. Gross, 1989) and Topics in Combinatorial Matrix Theory (with Jennifer Seberry and Christine A. Mynhardt, 1990).
Service to the profession
Lorch served the mathematical community in various capacities. She was president of the American Mathematical Society (AMS) from 2001 to 2003, the first woman to hold this position. She also served as vice president of the AMS from 1999 to 2001 and as a member of the AMS Council from 1994 to 1999, and again from 2003 to 2006.
Lorch served on the editorial boards of several mathematical journals, including the Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series A and Linear Algebra and its Applications. She was also a member of the American Association of University Women, the Association for Women in Mathematics, and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.
Awards and honors
Lorch received numerous awards and honors for her research and service. She was a Sloan Research Fellow from 1980 to 1982 and a Guggenheim Fellow from 1990 to 1991. She received the AMS Distinguished Teaching Award in 2007.
Personal life
Lorch was married to mathematician Chris Smyth, a physics professor at Mount Holyoke College.
Death
Lorch died on August 15, 2008, at the age of 56, from breast cancer.