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| International Women's day - Balance for better, Think Equal, Build smart, Innovate for change | | WOMEN MATHEMATICIANS | | Dr. Raj Shree Dhar | 3/7/2019 11:20:45 PM |
| Mathematics is a rare area of discipline in which women have proved themselves as intellectually competent enough at par with men. The Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) 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 offers numerous programs and workshops to mentor women and girls in the mathematical sciences. Mathematics as a field of science or philosophy was largely closed to women before the nineteenth century. However, from ancient times through the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century, some women have achieved notably in Mathematics.
Hypatia (400 A.D.) was the daughter of Theon of Alexandria who was a teacher of Mathematics with the Museum of Alexandria in Egypt, a center of Greek intellectual and cultural life, the Museum included many independent schools and the great library of Alexandria. Hypatia studied with her father, and with many others including Plutarch the Younger. She herself taught at the Neo-Platonist school of philosophy. She wrote on mathematics, astronomy and philosophy, including about the motions of the planets, about number theory and about conic sections. When the library of Alexandria was burned, and its cinders were used as fuel for baths, the works of Hypatia were destroyed.
Elena Cornaro Piscopia (1646-1684), Italian (Venice) mathematician, theologian - She was a child prodigy who studied many languages, composed music, sang and played many instruments, and learned philosophy, mathematics and theology. Her doctorate, a first, was from the University of Padua, where she studied theology. She became a lecturer there in Mathematics.
Maria Agnesi (1718-1799) , Italian Mathematician - Oldest of 21 children and a child prodigy who studied languages and math, she wrote a textbook to explain Math to her brothers which became a noted textbook on Mathematics.
Sophie Germain (1776-1830) , French Mathematician - She studied geometry to escape boredom during the French Revolution when she was confined to her family's home, and went on to do important work in mathematics, especially her work on Fermat's Last Theorem.
Mary Somerville (1780-1872) , Scottish and British Mathematician - known as the "Queen of Nineteenth Century Science," she fought family opposition to her study of Math, and not only produced her own writings on theoretical and mathematical science, she produced the first geography text in England.
Ada Lovelace(1815-1852) , British mathematician - The only legitimate daughter of Byron, the poet, her translation of an article on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine includes notations that describe what later became known as a computer and as software. In 1980, the Ada computer language was named for her.
Charlotte Angas Scott (1848-1931) , American - mathematician, educator - belonged to a supportive family that encouraged her education, Charlotte Angas Scott became the first head of the Math department at Bryn Mawr College. Her work to standardize testing for college entrance resulted in the formation of the College Entrance Examination Board.
Sofia Kovalevskay (1850-1891), Russian mathematician - She escaped her parents' opposition to her advanced study by a marriage of convenience, moving from Russia to Germany and, eventually, to Sweden, where her research in mathematics included the Koalevskaya Top and the Cauchy-Kovalevskaya Theorem.
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.
Alice Turner Schafer (1915-2009) was an American mathematician. She was one of the founding members of the Association for Women in Mathematics in 1971. After completing her Ph.D., she taught at Connecticut College, Swarthmore College, the University of Michigan and several other institutions. In 1962 she joined the faculty of Wellesley College as a full professor. As a teacher, Alice especially reached out students who had difficulties with or were afraid of mathematics, by designing special classes for them. She took a special interest in helping high-school students, women in particular, achieve in mathematics. In 1971, Schafer was one of the founding members of the Association for Women in Mathematics. She was elected as the second President of the association from 1973 to 1975. Schafer received many awards and honors for her service to mathematics. She received an honorary degree from the University of Richmond in 1964. She was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1985. In 1990 the Association for Women in Mathematics established the Alice T. Schafer Mathematics Prize to honor her for her dedicated service towards increasing the participation of women in mathematics. In January 1998, she received the Yueh-Gin Gung and Dr Charles Y Hu Award for Distinguished Service to Mathematics, awarded by the Mathematical Association of America.
Raman Parimala was born in 1948 and raised in Tamil Nadu, India. She studied at the Saradha Vidyalaya Girls' High School and Stella Maris College at Chennai. She received her M.Sc. from Madras University (1970) and her Ph.D. from Bombay University (1976). For many years, she was a professor at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai (Bombay), and she has held visiting positions at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zürich, the University of Lausanne, University of California-Berkeley, University of Chicago, Ohio State, and the University of Paris at Orsay.
Bhama Srinivasan received her Ph.D. in 1960 from the University of Manchester. She worked as Professor of Mathematics at University of Illinois at Chicago and was President of the Association for Women in Mathematics during 1981-1983.
Ramdorai Sujatha, from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai, picked up the award at a ceremony in Trieste, Italy. A female mathematician from India has been presented with the Ramanujan Prize, which honours young mathematics researchers from developing countries.
Maryam Mirzakhani, a professor of mathematics at Stanford University recipient of Field's Prize died at the age of 40.
Shakuntala Devi is an Indian calculating prodigy. Her calculating gifts first demonstrated themselves while she was doing card tricks with her father when she was three. By age six she demonstrated her calculation and memorization abilities at the University of Mysore. At the age of eight she had success at Annamalai University by doing the same. In 2006 she released a new book "In the Wonderland of Numbers" which talks about a girl Neha and her fascination for numbers. It was her passionate interest in exploring and increasing the learning capacity of the human mind that led her to build up the concept of `mind dynamics`. In 1977, in Dallas, she competed with a computer to see who give the cube root of 188138517 faster, she won. |
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