Margaret (Marge) Lial (late) was always interested in mathematics; it was her favorite subject in the first grade! Margaret’s intense desire to educate both herself and her students inspired the writing of numerous best-selling textbooks. Professor Lial, who received Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from California State University at Sacramento, was most recently affiliated with American River College. An avid reader and traveler, her travel experiences often found their way into her textbooks as exercise sets, applications, and feature sets.

Marge was particularly interested in archeology, and trips to various digs and ruin sites produced fascinating problems for her textbooks, involving such topics as the building of Mayan pyramids and the acoustics of ancient ball courts in the Yucatan.