A Few More

Most children have a person they look up to, someone they want to be like.  Sometimes its a sports celebrity.  Sometimes,  its a model or actress but how many times do you hear someone say "I want to be just like Katherine Johnson when I grow up." When I was young, I didn't know of any female mathematicians.  My high school Algebra teacher inspired me to go into Math.

I think its time we introduce students to some of these wonderful women who contributed to the field of mathematics.  The movie Hidden Figures introduced us to some fantastic ones but unless we see a movie or find something on the internet, most are unknown compared to Descartes, Galileo, or others.

1. Sophie Germain who lived during the French Revolution. When the revolution began, she shut herself in her father's study to read and learn.  It was upon learning about Archimedes that she developed an interest in mathematics. She taught herself Greek and Latin so she could study some of the mathematics in their original languages. 

Although she could not study at the local university, she managed to obtain study notes so she could learn.  Eventually one of the professors discovered she was submitting papers on a false name, so he became her mentor.  By the time she died, she'd become the first woman published by the French Academy of Sciences, proved Fermat's Last Theorem, and her work on the theory of elastisity.

2. Sophia Kovalevskaya born in to a Russia where women were not allowed to attend University so she married a paleontologist and they moved to Germany.  She was privately tutored until she received her Doctorate in Mathematics.  She was known for her papers on partial differential equations, Abelian equations, and Saturn's rings.

After her husband's death, she was appointed as lecturer at the University of Sweden, before becoming the first woman to be granted a full professorship in the region.   She won prizes from both the French Academy of Sciences and the Swedish Academy of Sciences before she died in 1891 at the age of 41.

3. Emmy Noether was lauded by Albert Einstein as the most brilliant and creative mathematicians produced since the higher education of women started.  She grew up in Germany where there were rules against women matriculating to higher at Universities.  Finally she received her PhD, when she wrote on a a topic in Abstract Algebra but she was unable to secure a university position for many years until she was granted an "unofficial associate professor" at the University of Gottingen but she lost it in 1933 because she was Jewish.

Due to the discrimination, she moved to America to teach and conduct research at Bryn Mawr College and the Advanced Institute for Advanced Studies.  Over time, she developed the mathematical foundations for Albert Einsteins general theory of relativity and advances in the field of algebra.

There are other examples I can share and will in the future.  I chose to omit Hypatia and Ada Lovelace because they are fairly well known but these three are not as well known.  If we want to convince women to going into mathematics, we need to show them some role models.

Let me know what you think, I'd love to hear.  Have a great day.