1. Women Mathematicians

2. Maria Gaetana Agnesi
                                                  
May 16, January 9, 1799

3.                                           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(a-y) 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.
                                         

4. Valentina Mikhailovna Borok
                                                                                      
July 9, February 4, 2004

5. 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"].

6. Dame Mary Lucy Cartwright
                                                  
December 17, April 3, 1998

7. 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).

8. Agnes Meyer Driscoll
                                                  
July 24, September 16, 1971

9. 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 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 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 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, She died in 1971 and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

10. Etta Falconer
                                                      
November 21, September 19, 2002

11. 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.

12. Hilda Geiringer von Mises
                                                      
September 28, March 22, 1973

13. 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 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"

14. Olive Clio Hazlett
                                                  
October 27, March 8, 1974

15. 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 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 , Paul Halmos was a student in her graduate algebra class.

16. Svetlana Jitomirskaya
                                                      
June 4,

17. 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 ( ) and rose through the ranks to become a visiting assistant professor ( ) 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 ( ) and a speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 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.

18. Cecilia Krieger
                                                      
April 9, August 17, 1974

19. 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 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.)

20. Emma Trotskaia Lehmer
                                                      
November 6,

21. 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.

22. Ruth Moufang
                                                      
January 10, November 26, 1977

23. Moufang studied mathematics at the University of Frankfurt, passing the teacher's examination in 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 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.

24. Hanna Neumann
                                                      
February 12, November 14, 1971

25. Hanna (von Caemmerer) Neumann was born in Berlin, Germany
Hanna (von Caemmerer) Neumann was born in Berlin, Germany. She completed her D.Phil at Oxford in 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 She is well known for her book Varieties of Groups, published in 1967.

26. Olga Arsen'evna Oleinik
                                                                                                    
July 2, October 13, 2001

27. 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 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.

28. Rózsa Péter
                                                  
February 17, February 16, 1977

29. 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 She received her Ph.D. in 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.

30. Virginia Ragsdale
                                                                                                      
December 13, June 4, 1945

31. She also posed the inequality
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.

32. Mary Emily Sinclair
                                                  

33. 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 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 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

34. Olga Taussky-Todd
                                                  
August 30, October 7, 1995

35. Olga Taussky is remembered by many for her lectures
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 In tracing her professional development, I will say a little about how the field came together.

36. Karen Uhlenbeck
                                                  
August 24,

37. Graduated from University of Michigan in 1964. Received her Ph. D
Graduated from University of Michigan in 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 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.

38. Dorothy Maud Wrinch
                                                  
September 12, February 11, 1976

39. 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 , 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, cancer-causing 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.

40. Grace Chisholm Young
                                                     March 15, March 29, 1944

41. In 1895 Grace Chisholm earned her Ph. D
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.