Joanne Elliott (December 5, 1925 – March 5, 2023) was an American mathematician who specialized in potential theory, ^[1] who was described as a "disciple" of her co-author, probability theorist William Feller. ^[2] She was also a professor of mathematics at Rutgers University. ^[1]

Elliott was born on December 5, 1925, in Providence, Rhode Island, ^[3] and graduated from Brown University in 1947. ^[3] She completed her Ph.D. at Cornell University in 1950, as part of a handful of "outstanding graduate students" working at Cornell in the post-World-War-II decade. ^[4] Her dissertation, On Some Singular Integral Equations of the Cauchy Type, was supervised by Harry Pollard. ^[5]

After a year at Swarthmore College, she worked at Mount Holyoke College as an assistant professor from 1952 until 1956, when she moved to Barnard College. ^[6] In 1958, she was the supervisor of Doris Stockton's doctorate at Brown University. ^[7] In 1961, as an associate professor at Barnard, she was funded by the National Science Foundation to visit the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey for postdoctoral research. ^[8] She also worked at the Institute for Defense Analyses in Princeton in the early 1960s. ^[2]

She came to Rutgers University in 1964, at a time when Rutgers had a much higher number of female faculty than many mathematics departments then or later. ^[9] Among her graduate students at Rutgers was Edward R. Dougherty, later a distinguished professor of electrical engineering at Texas A&M University. ^[5] She chaired the Rutgers mathematics department from 1974 to 1977. ^[9] Elliott retired from Rutgers in 1991, in a year in which the university was cutting costs by offering early retirement to its employees. ^[9]

Elliott died in Titusville, New Jersey on March 5, 2023, at the age of 97. ^[10]

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