Women of Mathematics
"Many of the best known mathematicians are male, although more women have entered mathematics since World War II. Women are still a small minority of notables in mathematics and neighboring branches of science such as physics. A number of prizes instituted by the AMS and other mathematical societies are aimed at changing this situation."
List of Female Mathematicians (Wikipedia)
List of Female Mathematicians (Wikipedia)
All of the pictures and information was taken from Biographies of Women of Mathematics. Also below is the link to the Association for Women in Mathematics and Biographies of Women of Mathematics.
Gallery
Hypatia
Hypatia was known more for the work she did in mathematics than in astronomy, primarily for her work on the ideas of conic sections introduced by Apollonius. She edited the work On the Conics of Apollonius, which divided cones into different parts by a plane. This concept developed the ideas of hyperbolas, parabolas, and ellipses. With Hypatia's work on this important book, she made the concepts easier to understand, thus making the work survive through many centuries. Hypatia was the first woman to have such a profound impact on the survival of early thought in mathematics. |
Ada Byron, Lady Lovelace
Babbage worked on plans for this new engine and reported on the developments at a seminar in Turin, Italy in the autumn of 1841. An Italian, Menabrea, wrote a summary of what Babbage described and published an article in French about the development. Ada, in 1843, married to the Earl of Lovelace and the mother of three children under the age of eight, translated Menabrea's article. When she showed Babbage her translation he suggested that she add her own notes, which turned out to be three times the length of the original article. Letters between Babbage and Ada flew back and forth filled with fact and fantasy. In her article, published in 1843, Lady Lovelace's prescient comments included her predictions that such a machine might be used to compose complex music, to produce graphics, and would be used for both practical and scientific use. She was correct. |
Susan Jane Cunningham
Susan Cunningham was born in Virginia. She studied astronomy and mathematics at Vassar College as a special student during 1866-67, working with Maria Mitchell, who encouraged so many Vassar students to continue in astronomy. She also took special courses in astronomy and mathematics during several summers at Harvard University, Princeton University, Newnham College at Cambridge, the Greenwich Observatory in England, and Williams College. In 1869 she helped to begin the astronomy and mathematics departments for the opening of Swarthmore College. She headed those two departments until her retirement from Swarthmore in 1906, rising through the ranks from instructor to full professor. In 1888 Swarthmore presented her with the honorary degree of Doctor of Science, the first degree of this kind given by that institution. |
Nancy Reid received her B.Math degree from the University of Waterloo in 1974 with a major in statistics, her M.Sc. in statistics from the University of British Columbia in 1976, and her Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1979. Her dissertation at Stanford was on "Influence Functions for Censored Data" [Abstract] under the supervision of R. G. Miller, Jr. Reid is currently the University Professor of Statistics at the University of Toronto where she has taught since 1986.
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Abigail Thompson was born on June 30, 1958, in Norwalk, Connecticut. She received her B.A. from Wellesley College in 1979 and her Ph.D. from Rutgers University [Abstract] in 1986. She held a Lady Davis Fellowship at Hebrew University (1986-87), a University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellowship at UC Berkeley (1987-88), a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship (1988-1991), and a Sloan Foundation Fellowship (1991-93). In 1990-91 and 2000-01 she was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study. Since 1988 she has been on the faculty at the University of California at Davis. She is the director of the California State Summer School in Mathematics and Science at UC Davis, a month-long residential program for talented high school students. Her current research concerns structures of 3-dimensional manifolds. She is married and has three children.
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Irene Hueter was one of the first women to earn a Ph.D. in the statistics department at the University of Bern in Switzerland. It was rare for a woman in Switzerland to become a mathematician working in academia. By the time she received her Ph.D. and left Switzerland, there were only two female math professors in all the Swiss universities.
Dr. Hueter was born in Bern, Switzerland. Before entering high school, she was often discouraged to like math as a girl and was pushed in other directions in spite of mathematics being her strongest subject. In the seventh grade, girls at her school were forced to take a sewing class while all boys took geometry. While the school did not want to make an exception upon her request to take the geometry, she still managed to learn it from her male classmates. In exchange, she solved the problems that they got stuck on. Dr. Hueter attributes her first encounter with probability to an exceptional and gifted high school teacher, whose class on probability and statistics thrilled and intrigued her. She recalls, "It was in a talk I gave in his class that, for the first time in my life, I got a sense of how exciting and how much fun doing research in math could be." There had been no doubt about her talent in mathematics since her early age, yet this wonderful and critical experience made her pursue further studies in statistics and mathematics. Shortly after, a bright professor at her university also led her to see the beauty of many other areas in mathematics through his lucid lectures and thought-provoking conversations with her. He was influential in her staying in mathematics and supported her in her early career. She went on to earn her M.Sc. in statistics and mathematical actuaries in 1989 with minors in mathematics and computer science, and her Ph.D. in the area of probability and statistics in 1992 with a thesis on "The Convex Hull of n Random Points and Its Vertex Process" under the direction of Professor Henri Carnal. |