Maria Gaetana Agnesi
May 16, 1718 - January 9, 1799
Maria
Gaetana Agnesi is best known from the
curve called the "Witch of Agnesi" (see
illustration from her text Analytical
Institutions). Agnesi wrote the equation of
this curve in the form y = a*sqrt(a*x-x*x)/x
because she considered the x-axis to be
the vertical axis and the y-axis to be the
horizontal axis [Kennedy]. Reference
frames today use x horizontal and y
vertical, so the modern form of the curve is
given by the Cartesian equation yx2=a2(ay) or y = a3/(x2 + a2). It is a versed sine
curve, originally studied by Fermat. "It was
called a versiera, a word derived from the
Latin vertere, meaning 'to turn', but it was
also an abbreviation for the Italian word
avversiera, meaning 'the wife of the devil'"
[Osen, 45]. However, when Maria's text
was translated into English the word
versiera was confused with "witch", and
the curve came to be known as the witch
of Agnesi.
Valentina Mikhailovna Borok
July 9, 1931 - February 4, 2004
Valentina Mikhailovna Borok was born on July 9, 1931, in Kharkov, Ukraine. Her
father, Michail Borok, had a PhD in chemistry and was an expert in material
science.
In 1949, by the advice of her high school teachers, Valentina decided to study
mathematics and was admitted as a math student to Kiev State University. There
she met and later married a fellow math student, Yakov Zhitomirskii. They were
inseparable for the next 54 years. In her second year of undergraduate studies,
Valentina (along with Yakov) started research under the supervision of Georgii
Shilov, and quickly established herself as a serious player in her area. Her
undergraduate thesis on the distribution theory and applications to the theory of
systems of linear PDEs was noted as outstanding and published in a top Russian
journal. It was later selected (in 1957) for one of the first volumes of the AMS
translations. In 1954, Valentina graduated from Kiev University and moved
(following G.E. Shilov) to the graduate school at Moscow State University, where
she received a PhD in 1957 ["On Systems of Linear Partial Differential Equations
with Constant Coefficients"].
Dame Mary Lucy Cartwright
December 17, 1900 - April 3, 1998
During the 1940's Mary Cartwright worked with John Littlewood on the solutions of
the Van der Pol equation and discovered many of the phenomena that later
became known as "chaos". In his review of Ian Stewart's book, Nature's Numbers,
Dyson writes about this work:
Cartwright had a distinguished career in analytic function theory and
university administration, publishing over 100 papers on classical analysis,
differential equations and related topological problems. In 1947 Cartwright
became the first woman mathematician to be elected as a Fellow of the Royal
Society of England. She was elected President of the London Mathematical
Society in 1951, received the Sylvester Medal of the Royal Society in 1964,
the De Morgan Medal of the London Mathematical Society in 1968, and in
1969 became Dame Mary Cartwright (the female equivalent of a knighthood).
Agnes Meyer Driscoll
July 24, 1889 - September 16, 1971
Agnes Meyer Driscoll was one of America's leading cryptanalysts
during the early part of the twentieth century and was sometimes
described as "the first lady of naval cryptology." She was born in
Genesco, Illinois in 1889. She attended Otterbein University in
Columbus, Ohio, from 1907 to 1909, then Ohio State University
where she studied mathematics, statistics, physics, music, and
languages (German, French, Latin, and Japanese). She received an
A.B. degree from Ohio State in 1911. Upon graduation she accepted
a job as Director of Music at Lowry Phillips Military Academy in
Texas, teaching there until 1914 when she became head of the
mathematics department at Amarillo High School in Texas.
Agnes Driscoll served as a "principal cryptanalyst" for the Navy until
December 1950. From 1950 to 1959 she worked for the Armed Forces
Security Agency, the precursor of today's National Security Agency, retiring
from active federal service on July 31, 1959. She died in 1971 and was
buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
Etta Falconer
November 21, 1933 - September 19, 2002
Professor Falconer was involved in instituting programs to help undergraduates
prepare for success in graduate school. Her efforts included the NASA Women
in Science Program started in 1987, NASA Undergraduate Science Research
Program, and the College Honors Program at Spelman College. She instituted
these programs for the purpose of directing high-ability students toward doctoral
programs. From the first class of NASA graduates, five entered graduate
programs in applied mathematics (Brown University), mathematics (University
of Maryland), operations research (Georgia Tech), chemistry (University of
Florida), and medicine (Baylor College of Medicine). The success of these five
students can be counted as a credit as well as an honor to Professor Falconer's
character. She also was a founder of the National Association of
Mathematicians, an organization that promotes concerns of black students and
mathematicians.
In 1995, Professor Falconer was awarded the AWM Louise Hay Award given to
celebrate outstanding achievements in mathematics education.
Hilda Geiringer von Mises
September 28, 1893 - March 22, 1973
Geiringer remained at the University of Berlin until forced to leave when
Hitler came to power. After a brief stay as a research associate at the
Institute of Mechanics in Belgium, she became a professor of
mathematics at Istanbul University in Turkey where she stayed for 5
years. In 1939 she emigrated to the United States and became a lecturer
at Bryn Mawr College. While at Bryn Mawr she married Richard von Mises
whom she had worked for at the University of Berlin and who was now
teaching at Harvard. In 1944 Geiringer became professor and chair of the
mathematics department at Wheaton College in Massachusetts. She
remained at Wheaton until her retirement in 1959. Attempts to find a
position at some of the larger universities near Boston repeatedly failed,
often because of her gender [1]. From 1955 to 1959 she did work as a
research fellow in mathematics at Harvard in addition to her position at
Wheaton.
Despite the considerable teaching demands of a small college, Geiringer
continued her mathematics research in the mathematical basis of
Mendelian genetics, the foundations of probability theory, and plasticity.
She also worked to complete her husband's unpublished manuscripts
after his death in 1953, particularly his textbook Mathematical Theory of
Probability and Statistics. Siegmund-Schultze calls her "one of the finest
applied mathematicians of this century"
Olive Clio Hazlett
October 27, 1890 - March 8, 1974
During Hazlett's first year at Illinois she taught College Algebra I and II,
Differential and Integral Calculus I and II, and the year long graduate
sequence in Modern Algebra. In 1928 she received a Guggenheim
Fellowship in 1928 to spend a year in Italy, Switzerland, and Germany.
During this year she presented a paper on "Integers as Matrices" at the
International Congress of Mathematicians. She then requested and
received an extension of her Guggenheim Fellowship to spend another
year in Europe. When she returned to Illinois in 1930, she was promoted
to associate professor with a salary of $4,000.
During the 1931-32 academic year, her teaching load had not changed
much from her first year at Illinois. That year she taught calculus, plane
trigonometry and analytic geometry, and again taught the graduate
sequence in Modern Algebra. During the academic year 1935-1936, Paul
Halmos was a student in her graduate algebra class.
Svetlana Jitomirskaya
June 4, 1966 -
Svenlana Jitomirskaya was born on June 4, 1966, and
raised in Kharkov, Ukraine, in a family of two
accomplished mathematicians (later three, counting her
older brother). [Her mother was Valentina Mikhailovna
Borok.] She received her undergraduate degree (1987)
and Ph.D. (1991) from Moscow State University. Since
1990 she has held a research position at the Institute
for Earthquake Prediction Theory in Moscow. In 1991
she came with her family to southern California. She
was employed by the University of California, Irvine, as
a part-time lecturer (1991-92) and rose through the
ranks to become a visiting assistant professor (199294) and then a regular faculty member (since 1994).
She took a leave from UCI to spend nine months at
Caltech (1996). She was a Sloan Fellow (1996-2000)
and a speaker at the International Congress of
Mathematicians in 2002. She is married and has three
children ranging in age from one to seventeen.
Jitomirskaya was awarded the 2005 Satter Prize from
the American Mathematical Society. This prize is
awarded every two years to recognize an outstanding
contribution to mathematics research by a woman in
the previous five years.
Cecilia Krieger
April 9, 1894- August 17, 1974
Krieger was the first woman, and the third person overall, to earn a
mathematics doctorate from a Canadian University. She had been appointed an
instructor in mathematics at Tronoto in 1928, and became a lecturer in
mathematics and physics in 1931 after spending some time at Göttingen upon
completion of her degree. After 12 years she was promoted to assistant
professor at the University of Toronto and taught there at that rank until her
retirement in 1962. She is known for her translation of Sierpinski's Introduction
to General Topology (1934) [Cover page] and General Topology (1952). In the
1934 translation Krieger also included an appendix that contained some of the
ideas and results from Sierpinski's text on transfinite numbers that were used in
the topology book.
The Canadian Mathematical Society now awards the CMS Krieger-Nelson
Prize Lectureship for Distinguished Research by Women in Mathematics in
honour of Cecilia Krieger and Evelyn Nelson. The 1997 award was presented
to Cathleen Morawetz. What follows is her acceptance speech (used with
permission of Professor Morawetz and the Association for Women in
Mathematics.)
Emma Trotskaia Lehmer
November 6, 1906 -
Emma Trotskaia was born in Samara, Russia, but her college education was at
the University of California at Berkeley. She earned a B.A. with honors in
mathematics in 1928.
She also married Derrick Henry Lehmer, a Berkeley physics major, that same
year. Her father-in-law, Derrick Norman Lehmer, was also a mathematician who
had employed Emma (at student wages) to do some tedious tabulating work that
his son was also helping him with.
After her husband's death in 1991, Emma wrote up her husband's
unfinished work and oversaw the publication of those materials. In August
2000, UC Berkeley hosted the Lehmer Conference to highlight the
mathematical contributions, inventions, and influences from Derrick
Norman Lehmer, Derrick Henry Lehmer, and Emma Lehmer. It took three
days and fifteen speakers to cover the range of their mathematical
interests.
Ruth Moufang
January 10, 1905 - November 26, 1977
Moufang studied mathematics at the University of Frankfurt,
passing the teacher's examination in 1929. She received her
Ph.D. in 1931 on projective geometry, then spent a fellowship
year in Rome. She returned to Germany to lecture at the
University of Konigsberg, then at the University of Frankfurt.
She went on to complete her habilitation thesis, which entitled
her to teach at the university level in Germany, but because she
was a woman, Hitler's minister of education would not allowed
her to teach the mostly male student population. Moufang
therefore became the first German woman with a doctorate to
be employed as an industrial mathematician when she went to
work for the Krupps Research Institute in the fall of 1937. In
1946 she was finally able to accept a teaching position at the
University of Frankfurt where, in 1957, she became the first
woman in Germany to be appointed as a full professor.
Moufang helped to create a new mathematical specialty in the
algebraic analysis of projective planes that drew upon a mixture
of geometry and algebra. Chandler and Magnus write that "Her
most outstanding contribution to this field [foundations of
geometry] is a result which adds a third important discovery to
two others made previously by Hilbert." She studied what are
known today as the Moufang plane and Moufang loops.
Moufang also published several papers in theoretical physics.
Hanna Neumann
February 12, 1914 - November 14, 1971
Hanna (von Caemmerer) Neumann was born in Berlin, Germany. She
completed her D.Phil at Oxford in 1944. Her research supervisor was Olga
Taussky-Todd. As M.F. Newman writes [1], "Her thesis was largely written by
candlelight in a rented trailer, to which the difficulties of finding housing had
forced the family to move. The typing was done on a card table by a haystack
when the weather permitted." Parts of her thesis on "Sub-group Structure of
Free Products of Groups with an Amalgamated Subgroup" were published in
two parts in the American Journal of Mathematics [Abstract]. After many years
of teaching in England, in 1964 she became head of the Department of Pure
Mathematics in the National University's School of General Studies in Australia.
She was one of the founding vice-presidents of the Australian Association of
Mathematics Teachers in 1966. She is well known for her book Varieties of
Groups, published in 1967.
Olga Arsen'evna Oleinik
July 2, 1925 - October 13, 2001
Ph.D. in 1954 from the Institute of Mathematics of Moscow State
University. Taught at Moscow State University since her graduate days.
Became head of the Department of Differential Equations in 1973. Wrote
over 300 published papers and eight books. Her main research was
concerned with algebraic geometry, partial differential equations, and
mathematical physics. Winner of numerous prizes. The 1996 AWM
Noether Lecturer.
She will also be remembered as a lady with a very strong personality. She
was very generous with her colleagues and her friendship, once acquired,
was limitless. Her loss will be deeply felt by the international mathematical
community.
The AWM/MSRI workshop to celebrate the careers of Olga
Ladyzhenskaya and Olga Oleinik was held May 18-20, 2006, in Berkeley,
California. Further information can be found at the MSRI website. In
particular, this site contains links to videos from the workshop including a
talk by Cathleen Morawetz on "Early memories of Olga Ladyzhenskaya
and Olga Oleinik" and other talks about the "two Olgas" and their
mathematical contributions.
Rózsa Péter
February 17, 1905 - February 16, 1977
Péter attended the Maria Terezia Girls' School until 1922, then entered
the Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest to study chemistry. She later
switched to the field of mathematics and received her degree in 1927.
She received her Ph.D. in 1935. In her early papers and in her
dissertation, Peter helped to found the modern field of recursive function
theory as a separate area of mathematical research.
In 1952 Péter became the first Hungarian female mathematician to become an
Academic Doctor of Mathematics. She received many honors and prizes
including the Kossuth Prize for her scientific and pedological work from the
Hungarian government (1951), the Mano Beke Prize by the Janos Bolyai
Mathematical Society (1953), and the State Prize, Silver Degree (1970) and
Gold Degree (1973). In 1973 she was elected as the first female
mathematician to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
Virginia Ragsdale
December 13, 1870 - June 4, 1945
Born on a farm in Jamestown, NC, just after the U. S. Civil War, Virginia
Ragsdale grew up in simple times. She attended a private school in
Jamestown, where mathematics was an important part of the curriculum.
In Ragsdale's own words, her teacher there delighted in helping his
students acquire "speed and accuracy" at "mental arithmetic" until they had
mastered the material "backwards and forwards."
Ragsdale's main conjecture was the following. Assume that an algebraic
curve of degree 2k contains p even and n odd ovals, then Ragsdale
conjectured that
p ≤ 3k(k-1)/2 + 1
n ≤ 3k(k-1)/2.
She also posed the inequality
| 2(p-n)-1 | ≤ 3k2 - 3k +1,
(which was later proved by Petrovskii) and showed that this inequality
cannot be improved.
Mary Emily Sinclair
1878-1955
Mary Sinclair was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, where her father,
John Elbridge Sinclair, was professor of mathematics at Worchester
Polytechnic Institute. She received her A.B. degree in 1900 from
Oberlin College where she was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, then
studied at the University of Chicago, earning her master's degree in
mathematics in 1903. From 1904 to 1907 she was an instructor at the
University of Nebraska while continuing to work on her graduate
studies in mathematics. She published two papers about surfaces of
revolution in the Annals of Mathematics (Vol. 8, July 1907, and Vol. 9,
July 1908). In 1908 Sinclair became the first woman to receive a Ph.D.
in mathematics from the University of Chicago. Her dissertation in the
calculus of variations, written under the direction of Oscar Bolza, was
about "Concerning a Compound Discontinuous Solution in the Problem
of the Surface of Revolution of Minimum Area." This was published in
the Annals of Mathematics, Vol 10 (January 1909), pp55-80 [Abstract].
In 1907 Sinclair had returned to Oberlin College as an instructor in
mathematics. She was promoted to associate professor upon receiving
her Ph.D., and to full professor in 1925. In 1941 she was appointed
Clark Professor of Mathematics at Oberlin College. Sinclair taught at
Oberlin for 37 years, including being department chair from 1939 until
her retirement in 1944
Mary Sinclair never married. In 1914, however, she adopted an infant daughter,
Margaret Emily
Olga Taussky-Todd
August 30, 1906 - October 7, 1995
Olga Taussky is remembered by many for her lectures. One was AWM's
Noether Lecture in 1981; this had a special resonance, for she had known
Emmy Noether both at Göttingen and at Bryn Mawr. Others remember Olga as
author of some beautiful research papers, as teacher, as collaborator, and as
someone whose zest for mathematics was deeply felt and contagious.
Born in 1906 in (the Moravian part of) the Austro-Hungarian empire, she
felt a powerful call to mathematics early in life. Her first research , at the
University of Vienna ( DPhil 1930 under Philipp Furtwängler), was on
algebraic number theory, an she never stopped regarding that as her
primary field. However, she acknowledged as equally important her
initiation to functional analysis by Hans Hahn at Vienna, and to algebraic
systems by Emmy Noether at Göttingen. Their perspectives affected her
work lifelong. (A recent paper of hers, perhaps her last paper, was a
reminiscence of Hahn.)
The field she is most identified with --which might be called "linear
algebra and applications" through "real and complex matrix theory"
would be preferred by some-- did not exist in the 1930's, despite the
textbook by C.C. MacDuffee. Her stature in that field is the very highest,
as was palpable in the standing ovation after her survey talk at the
second Raleigh conference in 1982. In tracing her professional
development, I will say a little about how the field came together.
Karen Uhlenbeck
August 24, 1942 -
Graduated from University of Michigan in 1964. Received her Ph.D. from Brandeis
University in 1968 with a thesis on "The Calculus of Variations and Global Analysis."
Uhlenbeck has made "pioneering contributions to global analysis and gauge theory
that resulted in advances in mathematical physics and the theory of partial
differential equations." [MAA Focus] She has taught at many universities and since
1987 has held the Third Sid W. Richardson Foundation Regents' Chair in
Mathematics at the University of Texas. Was a MacArthur Fellow in 1983. Elected to
the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1985) and the National Academy of
Sciences (1986). On December 1, 2000, she received a National Medal of Science
for "special recognition by reason of [her] outstanding contributions to knowledge" in
the area of mathematics. She has also served as Vice-President of the American
Mathematical Society. In 1990 she became only the second woman (after Emmy
Noether in 1932) to give a Plenary Lecture at an International Congress of
Mathematics.
Dorothy Maud Wrinch
September 12, 1894 - February 11, 1976
Dorothy Wrinch was a mathematician who made contributions to the areas of
mathematics, philosophy, physics, and biochemistry. She was born in Rosario,
Argentina, where her British parents were temporarily located while her father, an
engineer, worked for a British firm. Dorothy was raised in England, and in 1913
began her studies in mathematics and philosophy at Girton College, Cambridge
University. She was the only Girton woman Wrangler in the Mathematical Tripos in
1916, earning a First Class degree. In 1917 she took Part II of the Moral Sciences
(Philosophy) Tripos so that she could study symbolic logic with Bertrand Russell
whom she had met during her first year. She remained at Girton as a research
scholar during the academic year 1917-1918, continuing to correspond with
Russell who had moved to London.
Dr. Wrinch took diagrams of the structures of related chemical and biological
substances and fitted them into the "template" of living matter; that is, the
geometric surface pattern of the atoms in her ultimate life unit. These included
the sterobs, from which bile acids can be built up; hormones, vitamins, cancercausing substances and heart-stimulating drugs.
Dr. Wrinch presented a model of the building blocks of living things in the
form of a hollow cage, a truncated tetrahedron in shape.
Grace Chisholm Young
March 15, 1868 - March 29, 1944
In 1895 Grace Chisholm earned her Ph.D., magna cum laude, at the age of 27
with a thesis entitled "Algebraisch-gruppentheoretische Untersuchungen zur
sphärischen Trigonometrie" (Algebraic Groups of Spherical Trigonometry.)
Again government approval had to be obtained to allow her to take the
examination, which consisted of probing questions, in German, by several
professors on conic sections, geometry, differential equations, physics,
astronomy, and the area of her dissertation. She thus became the first woman
to officially receive a Ph.D. in Germany. As Sylvia Wiegand writes in [4]
One of Grace Young's fifteen grandchildren, Sylvia Wiegand, the daughter
of Laurence Young, is a mathematician at the University of Nebraska and a
past president of the Association for Women in Mathematics.