Timeline of women in mathematics in the United States

There is a long history of women in mathematics in the United States. All women mentioned here are American unless otherwise noted.

Timeline

19th Century

• 1829: The first public examination of an American girl in geometry was held. ^[1]
• 1886: Winifred Edgerton Merrill became the first American woman to earn a PhD in mathematics, which she earned from Columbia University. ^[2]
• 1891: Charlotte Angas Scott of Britain became the first woman to join the American Mathematical Society, then called the New York Mathematical Society. ^[3]
• 1894: Charlotte Angas Scott of Britain became the first woman on the first Council of the American Mathematical Society. ^[4]

20th Century

• 1913: Mildred Sanderson earned her PhD for a thesis that included an important theorem about modular invariants. ^[5]
• 1927: Anna Pell-Wheeler became the first woman to present a lecture at the American Mathematical Society Colloquium. ^[6]
• 1943: Euphemia Haynes became the first African-American woman to earn a Ph.D. in mathematics, which she earned from Catholic University of America. ^[7]
• 1949: Gertrude Mary Cox became the first woman elected into the International Statistical Institute. ^[8]
• 1956: Gladys West began collecting data from satellites at the Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division. Her calculations directly impacted the development of accurate GPS systems. ^[9]
• 1962: Mina Rees became the first person to receive the Award for Distinguished Service to Mathematics from the Mathematical Association of America. ^[10]
• 1966: Mary L. Boas published Mathematical Methods in the Physical Sciences , which was still widely used in college classrooms as of 1999. ^{[11] [12]}

1970s

• 1970: Mina Rees became the first female president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. ^[13]
• 1971:
  • Mary Ellen Rudin constructed the first Dowker space. ^[14]
  • The Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) was founded. It is a professional society whose mission is to encourage women and girls to study and to have active careers in the mathematical sciences, and to promote equal opportunity for and the equal treatment of women and girls in the mathematical sciences. It is incorporated in the state of Massachusetts. ^[15]
  • The American Mathematical Society established its Joint Committee on Women in the Mathematical Sciences (JCW), which later became a joint committee of multiple scholarly societies. ^[16]
• 1973: Jean Taylor published her dissertation on "Regularity of the Singular Set of Two-Dimensional Area-Minimizing Flat Chains Modulo 3 in R3" which solved a long-standing problem about length and smoothness of soap-film triple function curves. ^[17]
• 1974: Joan Birman published the book Braids, Links, and Mapping Class Groups . ^[18]
• 1975: Julia Robinson became the first female mathematician elected to the National Academy of Sciences. ^[19]
• 1976-1977: Marjorie Rice, an amateur mathematician, discovered four new types of tessellating pentagons in 1976 and 1977. ^{[20] [21]}
• 1979:
  • Dorothy Lewis Bernstein became the first female president of the Mathematical Association of America. ^[22]
  • Mary Ellen Rudin became the first woman to present the Mathematical Association of America’s Earle Raymond Hedrick Lectures, intended to showcase skilled expositors and enrich the understanding of instructors of college-level mathematics. ^[6]

1980s

• 1981: Canadian-American mathematician Cathleen Morawetz became the first woman to give the Gibbs Lecture of the American Mathematical Society. ^[23]
• 1981: Doris Schattschneider became the first female editor of Mathematics Magazine , a refereed bimonthly publication of the Mathematical Association of America. ^{[24] [25]}
• 1983: Julia Robinson became the first female president of the American Mathematical Society, ^[19] and the first female mathematician to be awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. ^[6]
• 1987: Eileen Poiani became the first female president of Pi Mu Epsilon. ^[26]
• 1988: Doris Schattschneider became the first woman to present the Mathematical Association of America’s J. Sutherland Frame Lectures. ^[6]

1990s

• 1992: Gloria Gilmer became the first woman to deliver a major National Association of Mathematicians lecture (it was the Cox-Talbot address). ^[27]
• 1995: Margaret Wright became the first female president of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. ^[6]
• 1996: Joan Birman became the first woman to receive the Mathematical Association of America’s Chauvenet Prize, an annual award for expository articles. ^[6]
• 1998: Melanie Wood became the first female American to make the U.S. International Math Olympiad Team. She won silver medals in the 1998 and 1999 International Mathematical Olympiads. ^[28]

21st Century

• 2002: Melanie Wood became the first American woman and second woman overall to be named a Putnam Fellow in 2002. Putnam Fellows are the top five (or six, in case of a tie) scorers on William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition. ^{[29] [30]}
• 2004:
  • Melanie Wood became the first woman to win the Frank and Brennie Morgan Prize for Outstanding Research in Mathematics by an Undergraduate Student. It is an annual award given to an undergraduate student in the US, Canada, or Mexico who demonstrates superior mathematics research. ^[31]
  • Alison Miller became the first female gold medal winner on the U.S. International Mathematical Olympiad Team. ^[32]
• 2006: Stefanie Petermichl, a German mathematical analyst then at the University of Texas at Austin, became the first woman to win the Salem Prize, an annual award given to young mathematicians who have worked in Raphael Salem's field of interest, chiefly topics in analysis related to Fourier series. ^{[33] [6]} She shared the prize with Artur Avila. ^[34]
• 2019:
  • Karen Uhlenbeck became the first woman to win the Abel Prize, with the award committee citing "the fundamental impact of her work on analysis, geometry and mathematical physics." ^[35]
  • Marissa Kawehi Loving became the first Native Hawaiian woman to earn a PhD in mathematics when she graduated from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2019. In addition to being Native Hawaiian, she is also black, Japanese, and Puerto Rican. ^[36]
• 2020:
  • Lisa Piccirillo published a mathematical proof in the journal Annals of Mathematics determining that the Conway knot is not a smoothly slice knot, ^{[37] [38]} answering an unsolved problem in knot theory first proposed over fifty years prior by English mathematician John Horton Conway. ^[39]

See also

Timeline of women in mathematics

References

1. Elizabeth Cady Stanton; Susan B. Anthony; Matilda Joslyn Gage; Ida Husted Harper, eds. (1889). History of Woman Suffrage: 1848–1861, Volume 1. Susan B. Anthony. p.  36 . Retrieved April 18, 2011.
2. Susan E. Kelly & Sarah A. Rozner (February 28, 2012). "Winifred Edgerton Merrill:"She Opened the Door"" (PDF). Notices of the AMS. 59 (4). Retrieved January 25, 2014.
3. Oakes, Elizabeth (2007). Encyclopedia of World Scientists, Revised Edition. Infobase Publishing. p. 655. ISBN   978-1-4381-1882-6.
4. Chaplin, Stephanie (1997). "Biographies of Women Mathematicians: Charlotte Angas Scott". Agnes Scott College . Retrieved October 22, 2012.
5. 🖉 "Mildred Leonora Sanderson". mathwomen.agnesscott.org.
6. "Prizes, Awards, and Honors for Women Mathematicians". agnesscott.edu. Retrieved January 25, 2014.
7. "Euphemia Lofton Haynes, first African American woman mathematician". math.buffalo.edu. Retrieved January 25, 2014.
8. "Gertrude Mary Cox". agnesscott.edu. Retrieved January 25, 2014.
9. "How Gladys West uncovered the 'Hidden Figures' of GPS". GPS World. March 19, 2018. Retrieved September 22, 2018.
10. "Mina Rees". mathwomen.agnesscott.org.
11. Mary L. Boas (1966). Mathematical methods in the physical sciences. Wiley. ISBN   9780471084174.
12. Spector, Donald (1999). "Book Reviews". American Journal of Physics . 67 (2): 165–169. doi:10.1119/1.19216.
13. "Mina Rees". agnesscott.edu. Retrieved January 25, 2014.
14. "New Zealand Mathematical Societu Newsletter Number 84, April 2002". Massey.ac.nz. Retrieved June 20, 2017.
15. "About AWM - AWM Association for Women in Mathematics" . Retrieved January 25, 2014.
16. "JCW-Math | Joint Committee on Women in the Mathematical Sciences". jcwmath.wordpress.com. Retrieved January 25, 2014.
17. "Jean Taylor". agnesscott.edu. Retrieved January 25, 2014.
18. "Interview with Joan Birman" (PDF). Notices of the AMS. 54 (1). December 4, 2006. Retrieved January 25, 2014.
19. "Profiles of Women in Mathematics: Julia Robinson". awm-math.org. Retrieved January 25, 2014.
20. Schattschneider, Doris (1978), "Tiling the plane with congruent pentagons", Mathematics Magazine , 51 (1): 29–44, doi:10.2307/2689644, ISSN   0025-570X, JSTOR   2689644, MR   0493766
21. Marjorie Rice, "Tessellations", Intriguing Tessellations, retrieved August 22, 2015– via Google Sites
22. Oakes, E.H. (2007). Encyclopedia of World Scientists. Facts On File, Incorporated. ISBN   9781438118826.
23. "Cathleen Morawetz". agnesscott.edu. Retrieved January 25, 2014.
24. "2005 Parson Lecturer - Dr. Doris Schattschneider". University of North Carolina at Asheville, Department of Mathematics. Archived from the original on January 11, 2014. Retrieved July 13, 2013..
25. Riddle, Larry (April 5, 2013). "Biographies of Women Mathematicians | Doris Schattschneider". Agnes Scott College . Retrieved July 13, 2013.
26. C.C. MacDuffee Award 1995 – Eileen L. Poiani, Pi Mu Epsilon , retrieved November 8, 2019
27. "Gloria Ford Gilmer". math.buffalo.edu. Retrieved January 25, 2014.
28. Rimer, Sara (October 10, 2008). "Math Skills Suffer in U.S., Study Finds". The New York Times. Retrieved November 20, 2019.
29. "Duke Magazine-Where Are They Now?-January/February 2010". dukemagazine.duke.edu. Retrieved January 25, 2014.
30. "Melanie Wood: The Making of a Mathematician - Cogito". cogito.cty.jhu.edu. Retrieved January 25, 2014.
31. "2003 Morgan Prize" (PDF). Notices of the AMS. 51 (4). February 26, 2004. Retrieved January 25, 2014.
32. "Math Forum @ Drexel: Congratulations, Alison!". mathforum.org. Retrieved January 25, 2014.
33. Short vita, retrieved 2016-07-04.
34. "UZH - Fields Medal Winner Artur Avila Appointed Full Professor at the University of Zurich". Media.uzh.ch. July 24, 2018. Retrieved October 9, 2018.
35. Change, Kenneth (March 19, 2019). "Karen Uhlenbeck Is First Woman to Receive Abel Prize in Mathematics". New York Times. Retrieved March 19, 2019.
36. Communications, Brown Office of University. "Horizons Seminar: Marissa Kawehi Loving". events.brown.edu.
37. Klarreich, Erica (June 2, 2020). "In a Single Measure, Invariants Capture the Essence of Math Objects". Quanta Magazine. Retrieved June 8, 2020.
38. Piccirillo, Lisa (2020). "The Conway knot is not slice". Annals of Mathematics. 191 (2): 581–591. arXiv: 1808.02923 . doi:10.4007/annals.2020.191.2.5. ISSN   0003-486X. JSTOR   10.4007/annals.2020.191.2.5. S2CID   52398890.
39. Klarreich, Erica (May 19, 2020). "Graduate Student Solves Decades-Old Conway Knot Problem". Quanta Magazine . Retrieved May 20, 2020.

Further reading

• A Brief History of the Association for Women in Mathematics: The Presidents' Perspectives, by Lenore Blum (1991)