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Maria Gaetana Agnesi
During the Middle Ages, under the influence of Christendom, many European countries were opposed to any form of higher education for females. Women were mostly deprived from the fundamental elements of education, such as reading and writing, claiming that these were a source of temptation and sin. For the most part, learning was confined to monasteries and nunneries which constituted the only opportunity for education open to girls during the Middle Ages. -
Florence Nightingale
Nightingale is most remembered for her work as a nurse in reforming hospital sanitation methods, yet she was also a pioneer in the applications of statistical analysis and methods of data presentation in medicine. She was an innovator in the collection, tabulation, interpretation, and graphical display of descriptive statistics. For example, Nightingale developed the "polar-area diagram," 1820-1910 -
Florence Eliza Allen
Florence Allen was born on October 4, 1876 in Horicon, Wisconsin. She received her undergraduate and master degrees at the University of Wisconsin in 1900 and 1901, respectively. In 1907 she became the second woman to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the fourth Ph.D. overall from that department. Her thesis was entitled "The cycle involutions of third order determined by nets of curves of deficiency 0, 1, and 2." -
Annie Dale Biddle Andrews
Annie Dale Biddle was born in Hanford, California, the youngest child of Samuel E. Biddle and A. A. Biddle. She received her B.A. degree from the University of California in 1908, and in 1911 she became the first woman to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California at Berkeley. Her dissertation, written under the joint supervision of Derrick Lehmer and Mellen Haskell, was on "Constructive theory of the unicursal plane quartic by synthetic methods" -
Hertha Marks Ayrton
Phoebe Sarah Marks was born in Portsea, England in 1854. She changed her first name to Hertha when she was a teenager. After passing the Cambridge University Examination for Women with honors in English and mathematics, she attended Girton College at Cambridge University, the first residential college for women in England. Charlotte Scott also attended Girton at this time, -
Lesley Sibner
LESLEY SIBNER is a native New Yorker. After a brief career in the theatre, she received her bachelor's degree in Fine Arts from the City College of New York in 1959. She came to mathematics quite late, only discovering her enthusiasm for it after taking a required calculus course designed for liberal arts majors. While at City College, she met her husband, Robert Sibner, who at the time was a graduate student in mathematics and was teaching as a lecturer in the Physics Department. -
Gloria Hewitt
In 1962, Gloria Hewitt became only the third African-American woman to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics. In a 1995 interview with Shannon Hensley, a student at Agnes Scott College, Hewitt referred to her college years at Fisk University when asked at what point she realized her interest in pursuing a career in mathematics: "I remember when I took calculus in college the only book I took home over the Christmas holidays was my calculus book. -
Sophie Germain
Germain taught herself mathematics by using books from her father's library. In the book Women in Mathematics, Lynn Osen says that Germain "spent the years of the Reign of Terror studying differential calculus" while confined to her home. During a lifetime of research in mathematics, she made important contributions to the areas of number theory and mathematical physics, 1776-1831 -
Maria Chudnovsky
Maria Chudnovsky associate professor in the department of industrial engineering and operations research at Columbia University, has been named a 2012 MacArthur Fellow (also know as the "genius award") for her work on the classifications and properties of graphs. Chudnovsky earned her Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton University in 2003. For more information about her fundamental work in graph theory and a video interview, see the MacArthur Foundation website or read the article about her in -
Maria Gaetana Agnesi
By the age of 20 she had started work on her most important contribution to mathematics, the book Analytical Institutions, which focused on differential and integral calculus. Originally intended as a textbook for her brothers, this work was eventually published in 1748 to wide acclaim, and was later translated into English. Early sections contained elementary problems on maxima, minima, tangents, and inflection points. Also described in the 1718-1799. -
Sofia (or Sonya) 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. It was her struggle to obtain the best education available which began to open doors at universities to women. In addition, her ground-breaking work in mathematics made her male counterparts reconsider their archaic notions of women's inferiority to men in such scientific arenas.
