women mathematicians

Roxanne Joie V. Deang

BSE IV Major in MathematicsBatch 2012

18th Century & Before

19th Century

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Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia

Theano

Hypatia

Emilie du Chatelet

Maria Gaetana Agnesi

Caroline HerschelSophie

GermainMary Fairfax Somerville

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Theano 6th Century B.C.

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Theano

Theano was the wife of Pythagoras. She and her two daughters carried on the Pythagorean School after the death of Pythagoras.

She wrote treatises on mathematics, physics, medicine, and child psychology.

Her most important work was the principle of the “Golden Mean.”

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Hypatia 370?-415


Hypatia

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Hypatia was the daughter of Theon, who was considered one of the most educated men in Alexandria, Egypt.

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.

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Hypatia

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Hypatia was the first woman to have such a profound impact on the survival of early thought in mathematics.

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.

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Elena Lucrezia Cornaro PiscopiaJune 5, 1646 - July 26, 1684


Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia

Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia was born into a noble Venetian family on June 5, 1646 in Venice, Italy.

She was given the title “Oraculum Septilingue” due to her command of languages.

In Hypatia's Heritage, Margaret Alic states that she became a mathematics lecturer at the University of Padua in 1678.

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Emilie du ChateletDecember 17, 1706 - September 10, 1749


Born in Paris on December 17, 1706, she grew up in a household where the art of courting was the only way one could mold a place in society.

Emilie's work in mathematics was rarely original or as captivating as that of other female mathematicians but it was substantive.

Emilie du Chatelet

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Emilie du Chatelet

Among her greatest achievements were her “Institutions du physique” and the translation of Newton's “Principia”, which was published after her death along with a “Preface historique” by Voltaire.

Emilie du Châtelet was one of many women whose contributions have helped shape the course of mathematics


Maria Gaetana AgnesiMay 16, 1718 - January 9, 1799



Maria Gaetana Agnesi was born in Milan on May 16, 1718, to a wealthy and literate family.

In 1738 she published a collection of complex essays on natural science and philosophy called “Propositiones Philosophicae”, based on the discussions of the intellectuals who gathered at her father's home.



By the age of twenty, she began working on her most important work, “Analytical Institutions,” dealing with differential and integral calculus.

It was one of the first and most complete works on finite and infinitesimal analysis.

Maria's great contribution to mathematics with this book was that it brought the works of various mathematicians together in a very systematic way with her own interpretations.



“Analytical Institutions” gave a clear summary of the state of knowledge in mathematical analysis.

Maria Gaetana Agnesi is best known from the curve called the “Witch of Agnesi.”


Caroline HerschelMarch 16, 1750 - January 9, 1848


Caroline Herschel

Caroline Herschel was born in 1750 into a working class family in Hanover, Germany.

Typhus struck Caroline at age ten. This stunted Caroline's growth; she never grew past four foot three.

When Caroline was twenty-two, her brother, William, took her away from her home in Hanover to Bath, England. He felt sympathy for his sister, and he needed a housekeeper.


Caroline Herschel

William Herschel had an obsession with seeing deeper and deeper into space by creating very powerful telescopes. After Caroline arrived, his notoriety flourished in England as a great telescope maker.

William trained her in mathematics, yet she was still a house maid, not yet his apprentice.

In time she began to help him in his business.


Caroline Herschel

Her first experience in mathematics was her catalogue of nebulae.

She calculated the positions of her brother's and her own discoveries and amassed them into a publication.

One interesting fact is that Caroline never learned her multiplication tables.


Sophie GermainApril 1, 1776 - June 27, 1831


Sophie Germain

Sophie Germain was born in an era of revolution. In the year of her birth, the American Revolution began.

She was a middle class female who went against the wishes of her family and the social prejudices of the time to become a highly recognized mathematician.

She is best known for her work in number theory.

Her work in the theory of elasticity is also very important to mathematics.


Mary Fairfax Somerville December 26, 1780 - November 29, 1872


Mary Fairfax Somerville

Mary Fairfax Somerville was born on December 26, 1780 in Jedburgh Scotland

“The Mechanism of the Heavens” was a great success, probably the most famous of her mathematical writings.


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1840-1859

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Ada Byron Lovelace

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Ada Byron LovelaceDecember 10, 1815 - November 27, 1852

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Ada Byron Lovelace

Augusta Ada Byron was born December 10, 1815 the daughter of the illustrious poet, Lord Byron.

In November, 1834 Ada heard Babbage’s ideas for a new calculating engine, the Analytical Engine and she was touched by the "universality of his ideas".

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Ada Byron Lovelace

Babbage worked on plans for this new engine and an Italian, Menabrea, wrote a summary of what Babbage described and published an article in French and Ada translated Menabrea's article.

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.


Ada Byron Lovelace

Ada suggested to Babbage writing a plan for how the engine might calculate Bernoulli numbers. This plan, is now regarded as the first “computer program.”

A software language developed by the U.S. Department of Defense was named “Ada” in her honor in 1979.

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Florence NightingaleMary Everest

Boole

1820-1839


Florence NightingaleMay 12, 1820 - August 13, 1910


Florence Nightingale

Florence Nightingale is most remembered as a pioneer of nursing and a reformer of hospital sanitation methods.

She developed the “polar-area diagram” to dramatize the needless deaths caused by unsanitary conditions and the need for reform.

She was an innovator in the collection, tabulation, interpretation, and graphical display of descriptive statistics.


Florence Nightingale

She also developed a Model Hospital Statistical Form for hospitals to collect and generate consistent data and statistics.

She became a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society in 1858 and an honorary member of the American Statistical Association in 1874.

Karl Pearson acknowledged Nighingale as a “prophetess” in the development of applied statistics.


Mary Everest Boole1832 - 1916


Mary Everest Boole

Mary Everest Boole was born in England in 1832.

At the age of 50, Mary began writing a series of books and articles, publishing them regularly until the time of her death.

Mary wrote and published her first book, “The Preparation of the Child for Science,” in 1904. This book ultimately had a great impact on progressive schools in England and the United States in the first part of the twentieth century.


Mary Everest Boole

She also invented “curve stitching,” or what we call today, string geometry, to help children learn about the geometry of angles and spaces.

Mary considered herself a mathematical psychologist. Her goal was to try "...to understand how people, and especially children, learned mathematics and science, using the reasoning parts of their minds, their physical bodies, and their unconscious processes.


Christine Ladd- Franklin

Susan Jane CunninghamElizaveta

Fedorovna Litvinova

Sofia Kovalevskaya

Ellen Amanda Hayes

Hertha Ayrton

Ida MetcalfCharlotte

Angas ScottAnna Julia Cooper

1840-1859


Susan Jane CunninghamMarch 23, 1842 - January 24, 1921


Susan Jane Cunningham

Susan Cunningham was born in Virginia. She studied astronomy and mathematics at Vassar College as a special student during 1866-67.

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.


Susan Jane Cunningham

In 1891 Cunningham was elected a member of the New York Mathematical Society (later to become the American Mathematical Society), one of the first six women to join this organization. She remained a member until her death in 1921.


Elizaveta Fedorovna Litvinova1845 - 1919


Elizaveta Fedorovna Litvinova

She studied mathematics on her own in Russia.

In 1872 she went to Zurich to study at the Polytechnic Institute, receiving her baccalaureate in 1876, and her doctoral degree in 1878 from Bern University.

She published over 70 articles on the philosophy and practice of teaching mathematics.


Christine Ladd- FranklinDecember 1, 1847 - March 5, 1930



Christine Ladd was born in Windsor, Connecticut on December 1, 1847.

She published solutions to mathematical problems in the Educational Times of London and the American journal The Analyst, and even studied mathematics at Harvard with W. E. Byerly and James Mills Peirce.



At Johns Hopkins, Ladd developed her interest in symbolic logic through the lectures of Charles Sanders Peirce, writing a dissertation on “The Algebra of Logic” and publishing several more articles in The Analyst.


Sofia KovalevskayaJanuary 15, 1850 - February 10, 1891


Sofia Kovalevskaya

An extraordinary woman, Sofia Kovalevskaya (also known as Sonia Kovalevsky) was not only a great mathematician, but also a writer and advocate of women's rights in the 19th century.

At the end of 4 years in the University, Sofia had produced three papers in the hopes of being awarded a degree. The first of these was entitled “On the Theory of Partial Differential Equations.”


Sofia Kovalevskaya

In 1880, she presented a paper on Abelian integrals at a scientific conference and was very well received.

She gained a tenured position at the university, was appointed an editor for a mathematics journal, published her first paper on crystals, and in 1885, was also appointed Chair of Mechanics.


Sofia Kovalevskaya

In 1888, she entered her paper, “On the Rotation of a Solid Body about a Fixed Point,” in a competition for the Prix Bordin by the French Academy of Science and won.


Ellen Amanda HayesSeptember 23, 1851 - October 27, 1930


Ellen Amanda Hayes

Ellen Hayes was born in Granville, Ohio, a town that her maternal grandparents helped to found in 1805.

Hayes was the first member of the Wellesley faculty to be given the title of Assistant Professor in 1882, and Associate Professor in 1883.

She was appointed Professor and head of the mathematics department in 1888.


Ellen Amanda Hayes

Her title was changed to Professor of Applied Mathematics, and in 1904 to Professor of Applied Mathematics and Astronomy.

Hayes wrote several textbooks on Lessons on Higher Algebra (1891, revised 1894), Elementary Trigonometry (1896), and Calculus with Applications, An Introduction to the Mathematical Treatment of Science (1900).


Hertha AyrtonApril 28, 1854 - August 23, 1923


Hertha Ayrton

Phoebe Sarah Marks was born in Portsea, England in 1854. She changed her first name to Hertha when she was a teenager.

She passed the Mathematical Tripos in 1880, although with a disappointing Third Class performance.

In 1884 she invented a draftsman's device that could be used for dividing up a line into equal parts as well as for enlarging and reducing figures.


Hertha Ayrton

She was also active in devising and solving mathematical problems, many of which were published in the Mathematical Questions and Their Solutions from the “Educational Times.”

She published several papers from her own research in electric arcs in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London and The Electrician, and published the book “The Electric Arc” in 1902.


Ida Martha MetcalfAugust 26, 1857 - October 24, 1952


Ida Martha Metcalf

Ida Metcalf was born in 1857.

In 1893 she became the second American woman to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics with a dissertation entitled “Geometric Duality in Spaces.”

For a time she was an assistant to Professor George Williams Jones in writing his mathematical textbooks, drill books in algebra and trigonometry, and logarithm and interest tables.


Charlotte Angas ScottJune 8, 1858 - November 10, 1931


Charlotte Angas Scott

Charlotte Angas Scott overcame society's disapproval by emerging as one of England's first women to obtain a doctorate in mathematics.

Charlotte wrote a book entitled “An Introductory Account of Certain Modern Ideas and Methods in Plane Analytical Geometry” which was first published in 1894, reprinted thirty years later , and still widely used.


Charlotte Angas Scott

She is credited with being the author of the first mathematical research paper written in the US to be widely recognized in Europe, “A Proof of Noether's Fundamental Theorem,” Mathematische Annalen, Vol. 52 (1899).


Anna Julia Haywood CooperAugust 10, 1858 - February 27, 1964


Anna Julia Haywood Cooper

Anna Haywood was born in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1858, the daughter of a slave woman and her white master.

Cooper had a long and distinguished career as a teacher, primarily at Washington High School in Washington, D.C.where she was originally hired to teach mathematics and science, and later as president of Frelinghuysen University, a Washington school for adult education.


Anna Julia Haywood Cooper

She was also well known as an author. Her first book, “A Voice from the South: By a Woman from the South,” published in 1892, is often considered as one of the first articulations of Black Feminism.
