Rozella B. Smith

Key takeaways

Rozella B. Smith belongs to astronomy; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Rozella B. Smith to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Rozella B. Smith from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Rozella B. Smith (1911–1987) was an American herpetologist and data archivist and analyst.

Biography Rozella Pearl Beverly Blood was an only child, born 18 May 1911 in Wichita, Kansas, to Charles Gillman Blood and Sarah Dorothy "Dollie" Sherman. She died in Boulder, Colorado on 15 December 1987. Rozella Blood enrolled in Wichita High School in 1929 and then became a student at the institution then-called the University of Wichita, earning a B.A. in 1932 and an M.S. in entomology in 1933. She went on to attend the University of Kansas Medical School as a graduate student and assistant instructor in anatomy, neurology and histology, also working as a staff artist, from 1933 to 1937. After earning a teaching certificate in Kansas, she taught science and mathematics for a year at Altoona High School starting in the fall of 1937.

Researcher and teacher In 1938, she married fellow graduate student and herpetologist Hobart M. Smith in Chicago, Illinois, and changed her name to Rozella B. Smith. They would go on to have two children, Bruce and Sally. Following the wedding, the pair left on a two-year research trip to Mexico, where they gathered more than 20,000 amphibians and reptiles, which were all preserved, tagged and transported to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. After the trip's conclusion, the Smiths moved to Washington for a year to oversee the integration of their specimens into the Smithsonian's collections. At the University of Illinois, she attended classes as "an unattached graduate student" from 1953 to 1961. Later, in 1963, she earned a second a Master of Science degree, this time in library science. Then, she earned a second teaching certificate so she could lead classes in ancient history for a year at the University High School beginning in 1965. After moving to Boulder, Colorado, in 1968, where she worked at the University of Colorado, she gave "guidance to undergraduates, graduates, and faculty members in her own and other departments, and to affiliates of the Center for Computer Research in the Humanities, in techniques of her special forte of fixed-field data processing and retrieval, and of correlation indexing." In August 1982, she was awarded an honorary Doctor of Science degree from the University of Colorado in recognition of her work with undergraduate and graduate students.

Data analysis Smith was working as head cataloger in the library of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, in 1966, when she began customizing new cataloging software on computers that had just been made available. She took on the job of digitizing the large quantity of data and graphics accumulated over nearly 30 years of collecting by herself and her co-author and husband. Throughout this time, supported from 1971 to 1985 with grants from the National Library of Medicine and several National Science Foundation divisions, she created the computational structures, input mechanisms, data analysis techniques and output documents. In so doing she provided essential information to her collaborator, H.M. Smith, who used her analytical results to evaluate his extensive research collection and publish more than 1,600 manuscripts, with many listing Rozella as coauthor.

Taxa In her honor, several species-group taxa bear the name rozellae including a subspecies of snake, Tantillita lintoni rozellae, 1940, and a species of lizard, Celestus rozellae, 1942.

Selected works Rozella Smith was author or co-author of seven books and close to 70 articles, as well as many other projects that remained unfinished and unpublished, such as several data analysis works about Mexican herpetology.

Smith, Hobart Muir, and Rozella B. Smith. Early foundations of Mexican herpetology: An annotated and indexed bibliography of the herpetological publications of Alfredo Dugès, 1826-1910. University of Illinois Press, 1969. Bock, C. E., and Rozella B. Smith. "An analysis of Colorado Christmas counts." Am. Birds 25.6 (1971): 945–947. Smith, Hobart M., and Rozella B. Smith. "Synopsis of the Herpetofauna of Mexico, vol. 1, Analysis of the Literature on the Mexican Axolotl." Augusta: Lundberg Press (1971). Smith, Hobart M., and Rozella B. Smith. "Chresonymy ex synonymy." Systematic Biology 21.4 (1972): 445-445. Smith, Hobart M., Rozella B. Smith, and H. Lewis Sawin. "The generic name of the neotropical semiterrestrial emydine turtles." Transactions of the Kansas Academy of Science (1903) (1974): 211–218. Smith, Hobart M., Rozella B. Smith, and H. Lewis Sawin. "A summary of snake classification (Reptilia, Serpentes)." Journal of Herpetology (1977): 115–121. Pérez-Higareda, Gonzalo, Hobart M. Smith, and Rozella B. Smith. "A new species of Tantilla from Veracruz, Mexico." Journal of herpetology 19.2 (1985): 290–292. Southwick, Charles H., and Rozella B. Smith. "The growth of primate field studies." Comparative primate biology 2.pt A (1986): 73–91.

References

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Rozella B. Smith

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Rozella B. Smith claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In astronomy, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Rozella B. Smith before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Rozella B. Smith ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Rozella B. Smith

In research: Rozella B. Smith appears in astronomy research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Rozella B. Smith in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Rozella B. Smith is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1911 births, 1987 deaths, 20th-century American women biologists, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Rozella B. Smith outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

How to study Rozella B. Smith in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Rozella B. Smith means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Rozella B. Smith out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Rozella B. Smith in simple terms?

Rozella B. Smith (1911–1987) was an American herpetologist and data archivist and analyst.

Why does Rozella B. Smith matter?

Because it connects several astronomy ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Rozella B. Smith?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Rozella B. Smith.