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Maria Gaetana Agnesi
- 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.
- 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 was called a versiera, a word derived from the Latin vertere, meaning 'to turn'.
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Hertha Marks Ayrton
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. 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". Tattersall and McMurran write that "Her many solutions indicate without a doubt that she possessed remarkable geometric insight and was quite a clever student of mathematics." -
Elizabeth Ruth Bennett
Elizabeth Bennett was the first woman to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Illinois, and the second Ph.D. overall from that department. She was born in 1880 and received her A.B. degree in 1903 from Ohio University in Athens, OH. She held a scholarship in mathematics at Illinois for 1907-1908, and a fellowship from 1908-1910. She received her masters degree in 1908 and her Ph.D. in 1910 with a thesis on "Primitive groups with a determination of the primitive groups of degree" -
Mina Rees
She went to major in mathematics at Hunter College, graduating summa cum laude in 1923, while also holding a part-time teaching job for the mathematics department. After graduation Rees taught at the Hunter College High School while working on a master's degree at Columbia University. In an interview for Mathematical People, she says that she heard, unofficially, that "the Columbia mathematics department was really not interested in having women candidates for Ph.D's." -
Alice Roth
Alice attended the Höhere Töchterschule der Stadt Zürich, a municipal school for higher education for girls. There she studied mathematics, physics, chemistry, Latin, and foreign languages, passing the examination in 1924 that would allow her to be admitted to a university. From 1925 to 1929, Alice studied mathematics, physics, and astronomy at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zürich. -
Louise Johnson Rosenbaum
L. Rosenbaum was the first woman to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of Colorado. The University of Colorado considered itself founded in 1876, but the only tangible evidence of this was a building, completed in July of that year, and the fifty-two acres on which it was built. -
Valentina Mikhailovna Borok
Valentina Mikhailovna was considered THE teacher of rigorous analysis in Kharkov State University. That was the course in which all the ambitious math students at Kharkov State got their first taste of research through her famous sets of "creative problems," which were required to get an A. She also developed and published original lecture notes on a number of other core courses, as well as more specialized courses, in analysis and PDEs. -
Judith D. Sally
Judith Sally received her BA degree in 1958 from Barnard College and her MA in mathematics from Brandeis University in 1960. She began her graduate studies at the University of Chicago in 1968 when her youngest child began kindergarten, receiving her Ph.D. three years later under the direction of Irving Kaplansky. Her dissertation was on "Regular Overrings of Regular Local Rings", which she published in the Transactions of the American Mathematical Society. -
Cora Sadosky
She entered the University of Buenos Aires at the age of 15 with the intention of majoring in physics, but switched to mathematics after her first semester. During her undergraduate years she became one of the first students of Antoni Zygmund and Alberto Calderón during their periodic visits to the University of Buenos Aires from the University of Chicago. In 1960 she earned her Licenciada degree, just two years after her mother received her Ph.D. in mathematics at the same university. -
Lenore Blum
Lenore Blum was a bright and artistic child who loved math, art, and music from her original introductions to them. She began college at Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh studying first architecture and then math, her real love. She enrolled at Simmons, a women's college in Boston, only to find the math courses not challenging enough. Blum has been widely recognized as a champion for women and girls in mathematics. As was said, she was a charter member of the Association for Women in Mathematics.
