Elizabeth Samantha Meckes (1980–2020)^[1] was an American mathematician specializing in probability theory. Her research included work on Stein's method for bounding the distance between probability distributions and on random matrices. She was a professor of mathematics, applied mathematics, and statistics at Case Western Reserve University.^[2] She died in December 2020 after a brief battle with cancer.^[3]

Meckes went to Case Western Reserve University as an undergraduate, and graduated summa cum laude in 2001 with a bachelor's degree in mathematics and a minor in German. She remained at Case for a master's degree, which she completed in 2002. Her master's thesis, Harmonic Maps Between Graphs, was supervised by E. Jerome Benveniste.^[4]

Next, Meckes became a doctoral student of Persi Diaconis at Stanford University. She completed her Ph.D. there in 2006; her dissertation was An Infinitesimal Version of Stein’s Method.^[4][5]

After postdoctoral research at Cornell University and the American Institute of Mathematics, Meckes returned to Case as a faculty member in 2007. She was tenured in 2013 and promoted to full professor in 2018.^[4]

With Mark W. Meckes, Elizabeth Meckes wrote the textbook Linear Algebra (Cambridge University Press, 2018).^[6] She is also the author of The Random Matrix Theory of the Classical Compact Groups (Cambridge University Press, 2019).^[7]

In 2019, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS) recognized Meckes as an IMS Fellow, "for contributions to Stein’s method and to random matrix theory".^[8] She was twice named a Simons Fellow in Mathematics, in 2013 and 2020. She was a Fellow of the American Institute of Mathematics, 2006–2011.

In 2023, Case Western Reserve University began hosting an annual seminar series in her honor.^[9]