MATHEMATICIANS
She was an Indian writer and mathematician often called the "human computer". This was due to her ability to perform large calculations in her head.
Shakuntala Devi
She was a Black mathematician who worked for NASA (then NACA) from 1955-1989. She most famously worked on the Centaur rocket, which powered the first space probe to land on the moon.
Annie J. Easley
Hypatia of Alexandria was a 4th century philosopher and mathematician. She was a Neoplatonist and instructed many pupils. At a time when the Roman empire was becoming increasingly Christian, Hypatia, as a prominent Pagan and female academic, was murdered by Christian mob in 415 ce.
Hypatia
She is a Taiwanese-American mathematician who is a professor at University of California, Irvine. Her work primarily concerns differential geometry, partial differential equations, and integrable systems. She co-organized the IAS Mentoring Program for Women in Mathematics for 15 years.
Chuu-Lian Terng
Mizakhani was the first (and currently only) woman to win the Fields Medal, one of math’s highest honors, for her work on complex geometry and dynamic systems. She was born in Iran and worked as a professor at Standford. She passed away due to breast cancer at age 40 in 2017.
Maryam Mizakhani
She was the eleventh African American woman to receive a PhD in mathematics and spent most of her career teaching at Spelman College. Falconer also assisted with establishing a computer science department at Spelman while head of the mathematics department. She dedicated her life to increasing the number of African American women in mathematics.
Etta Zuber Falconer
She is a Duke University professor who researches number theory and harmonic analysis. She once contradicted the Queen of England about women’s ability to do math.
Lillian Pierce
Not just a mathematician, Cheng is pianist, baker, and author. She teaches at the Art Institute of Chicago, teaching mathematics and mathematical thinking to undergraduate art students. She aims to cure fears of math by demonstrating that it can be fun with innovative teaching methods.
Eugenia Cheng
She was the first American woman awarded a Mathematics PhD, which she received from Columbia (all-male at the time) in 1886. When at Columbia, she was not allowed to attend lectures and largely had to study alone from books. She served on the committee that founded Barnard College, a Columbia-affiliated women’s college.
Winifred Edgerton Merril
She is a Black mathematician who decided she was less suited to academia and moved into government. She works as a data scientist for the Department of Defense. In the past, she has worked on fraud analytics and cloud-hosting for the SSA.
Carla Cotwright-Williams
She’s an American mathematician renowned for her work on geometric analysis and gauge theory. In 2019, she was the first woman to win the Abel Prize for her work on geometry and minimal surfaces.
Karen Uhlenbeck
A professor of mathematics at Tufts University, she has developped a program to train mathematicians to testify in court as expert witnesses in cases of gerrymandering.
Moon Duchin
Emmy was a famous German Jewish mathematician, called the most important woman in the history of mathematics by people such as Einstein. She had to leave her teaching position in Germany when Nazis came to power and banned Jewish people from holding university positions. She ended up teaching at Bryn Mawr College. Noether’s work influenced mathematics and theoretical physics.
Emmy Noether
Although she was banned from formal studies, Sophie persevered and made important contributions to mathematics. During the French Revolution in her childhood, she was confined indoors where she developed a love of math. She proved Fermat’s Last Theorem for prime numbers known as Germain primes.
Sophie Germain
Harris is is a Mexican-American mathematician whose research concerns algebra and combinatorics. She is a co-organizer of the national conference of the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science. She works to feature and celebrate the contributions of Latinx people to mathematics.
Pamela Harris
She is a mathematician and musician who specializes in the application of mathematics to medicine. She completed her undergrad studies as a single mother and is currently the president of the Association for Women in Mathematics.
Ami Radunskaya
She was was the first African American woman to earn a PhD in mathematics. She spent her life teaching mathematics and fighting racial segregation in schol systems. In 1943 at the age of 53, she received her PhD from the Catholic University of America.
Euphemia Lofton Haynes
Johnson is most famously known for her work as a computer for NASA, where she worked on Alan Shepard’s spaceflight and John Glenn’s orbital mission. Johnson was also one of the first three Black students to enroll at West Virginia University after the graduate school was integrated, where she studied math.
Katherine Johnson
Toro is a Latina mathematician and UW professor. She was a key organizer ofthe lecture series “Latinx in the Mathematical Sciences.” Her primary areas of interest are geometric measure theory, non-smooth analysis, and partial differential equations.
Tatiana Toro
Vaughan was an African American woman who famously worked for NASA as part of the first group of African Americans hired by mathematicians. She became the first Black supervisor, where she advocated for the Black mathematicians working under her, even teaching her colleagues FORTRAN. Her presence was essential to America’s ascent into space and the opportunities for Black woman at NASA.
Dorothy Vaughan