Women in Mathematics, Science, and Engineering

Lenore Blum

Marjorie Lee Browne

Fan Chung

Ingrid Daubechies

Grace Hopper

Inge Lehmann

Barbara McClintock

Cathleen Morawetz

Julia Robinson

Miriam Rothschild

Helen Taussig

Jean Taylor

Karen Uhlenbeck

Lesley Ward

Sharon Alden

Lenore Blum

Lenore Blum, now a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, was one of the pioneers of math programs for women. In 1976, she helped begin Expanding Your Horizons, a series of one-day, hands-on math workshops for middle-school girls. They are now held across the country.

In 1991, she helped start one of the first math programs for female undergraduates, the Summer Mathematics Institute, which moved from Mills College to the University of California at Berkeley in 1994 and ended in 1997.

All of those programs work, says Ms. Blum. "We've known what to do for 30 years," she says, ticking off the key features: "Getting a critical mass of girls or women together to do math, making math a positive experience, and having networking and mentorship."

But even successful programs come and go, depending on the federal government's willingness to sponsor them. "There hasn't been sustained funding," says Ms. Blum. Instead, she adds, the National Science Foundation has been "pouring money into studies on why there aren't women in math."

Educators should take a cue from what Title IX did for female athletes, she argues. "In sports, people say: 'Just have a program. Get girls out there.'" The same is true in math. "Nothing works like getting them out there, together and doing math. You don't have to have a study" to find out why there aren't more women in math departments.

-- Lenore Blum

Marjorie Lee Browne

"I always, always, always liked mathematics. As a child I was rather introverted, and as far back as I can remember I liked mathematics because it was a lonely subject. I could do it alone."
-- Dr. Marjorie Lee Browne, 1914-1979.
Until 1949, only one African American woman had earned a Ph.D. in mathematics, Euphemia Lofton Haynes in 1943. In 1949, Dr. Browne was awarded her Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Michigan.

Fan Chung

"Don't be intimidated!" is Dr. Fan Chung's advice to young women considering careers in mathematics. "I have seen many people get discouraged because they see mathematics as full of deep incomprehensible theories. There is no reason to feel that way. In mathematics whatever you learn is yours and you build it up -- one step at a time. It's not like a real time game of winning and losing. You win if you are benefitted from the power, rigor and beauty of mathematics. It is a big win if you discover a new principle or solve a tough problem."

Chung regards herself as being luckier than many mathematicians. "As an undergraduate in Taiwan, I was surrounded by good friends and many women mathematicians. We enjoyed talking about mathematics and helping each other. A large part of education is learning from your peers, not just the professors. Seeing other women perform well is a great confidence builder, too!"
-- Fan Rong K Chung Graham (Jin Fangróng) (born October 9, 1949 in Taiwan), known professionally as Fan Chung

Source: A profile of Fan Chung

Ingrid Daubechies

"From when I was little, until almost the end of high school, I had asserted that I wanted to be an engineer. Nobody ever told me that I couldn't, so it didn't occur to me. It may have helped that I went to an all-girls school (all public schools in Belgium were then single-gender schools); I was never exposed to the attitude that girls might not be as good at mathematics or science as boys, because there were no boys. My parents never made any distinction between my brother and me in their expectations for our education and careers. Later on, I did meet people who felt or even articulated very clearly that women were less 'suited' for mathematics or science, but by then I was confident enough to take this as a sign of their narrow-mindedness rather than let it influence me."
-- Ingrid Daubechies, Department of Mathematics, Princeton University, Born 17 Aug 1954 in Houthalen, Belgium.

Grace Murray Hopper

In 1991 President George Bush awarded Grace Hopper the National Medal of Technology. She was: ... the first woman to receive America's highest technology award as an individual. The award recognises her as a computer pioneer, who spent a half century helping keep America on the leading edge of high technology.

Rear Admiral Grace Brewster Murray Hopper (USNR Retired) was a computer scientist who studied mathematics and physics at Vassar College graduating with a BA in 1928. She received her MA from Yale in 1930, and in 1934 was awarded her doctorate in mathematics.

In the early 1950s, she pioneered the use of compilers. In 1952 she had an operational compiler. She said, "Nobody believed that -- I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. They told me computers could only do arithmetic." Hopper's reason for designing a compiler was, she wrote later, because she was lazy and hoped that the introduction of compilers would allow the computer programmer to return to being a mathematician.
-- Grace Hopper, 1906-1992

Inge Lehmann

In 1936, Danish seismologist Inge Lehman (born in 1888- and died in 1993) presented evidence for the existence of a solid inner core. This discovery 5121 km below the surface of the earth was based on observations of the reflection and refraction of seismic waves generated by deep focus earthquakes. From Lehmann's discovery of the earth's inner core have come current ideas on the origin of the earth's magnetic field.

Lehmann attended the first coeducational school in Denmark, which was founded and run by Hanna Adler. (Adler's nephew, Neils Bohr, was the first to describe the physical makeup of the atom). At that school, Lehmann wrote many years later, "No difference between the intellect of boys and girls was recognized--a fact that brought me dissapointment later in life when I found that this was not the general attitude."
-- Inge Lehmann, 1888-1993

Source: http://www.physics.ucla.edu/~cwp/Phase2/Lehmann,_Inge@81234567.html

Barbara McClintock

Barbara McClintock was born June 16, 1902, in Hartford, Connecticut, one of four children of Thomas Henry McClintock and Sara Handy McClintock. Her family moved to Brooklyn, New York, in 1908. She graduated from Erasmus Hall High School in 1919. McClintock earned her B.S. and M.S. degrees in botany at Cornell University, and received her Ph.D. in the same subject at Cornell in 1927. Although women were not permitted to major in genetics at Cornell, she became a highly influential member of a small group who studied maize (corn) cytogenetics, the genetic study of maize at the cellular level.

"Over the many years, I truly enjoyed not being required to defend my interpretations. I could just work with the greatest of pleasure. I never felt the need nor the desire to defend my views. If I turned out to be wrong, I just forgot that I ever held such a view. It didn't matter."
-- Barbara McClintock, 1983

Source: http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/LL/Views/Exhibit/narrative/biographical.html

Cathleen Synge Morawetz

In 1998 Morawetz was awarded the National Medal of Science. Established by the United States Congress in 1959 and first awarded to Theodore von Kármán in 1962, it is the highest scientific honour which the United States can give. The citation for the award says that it was given to Morawetz "for pioneering advances in partial differential equations and wave propagation resulting in applications to aerodynamics, acoustics and optics."

In her speech accepting the National Medal of Science, Morawetz said, "This is an occasion of great moment for me. I am filled with gratitude to all those, and there were a great many, who helped me over many years, and I am proud to be the first woman mathematician to receive the medal. My biggest wish would be that it could help move more women forward in mathematics, be it in grade school or graduate school."

The list of her remarkable achievements gives her own joke a deeper meaning: "Maybe I became a mathematician because I was so crummy at housework."
-- Cathleen Synge Morawetz, born 5 May 1923 in Toronto, Canada

Julia Hall Bowman Robinson

"What I really am is a mathematician. Rather than being remembered as the first woman this or that, I would prefer to be remembered, as a mathematician should, simply for the theorems I have proved and the problems I have solved."
-- Dr. Julia Hall Bowman Robinson, 1919-1985.

Miriam Rothschild

"I was educated at home, my father hated schools and he hated public examinations, with the result that I never took any. And I was really completely uneducated, but at home natural history and science were part of every day life: it wasn’t a subject, we just lived it, and the first thing I can remember is having a bird as a pet and having white mice to look after and I grew up as a naturalist from the word go."
-- The Hon. Dame Miriam Louisa Rothschild, British Entomologist (1908-2005)

Helen Brooke Taussig

Having struggled with severe dyslexia to complete college, Helen Brooke Taussig (1898-1986) regarded the fact that women were rarely admitted to medical school as just another hurdle to get past. She completed her studies at John Hopkins Medical School but was then confronted with the loss of her hearing. Determined to practice anyway, and choosing pediatric cardiology as her specialty, she learned to read lips and to "listen with her fingers" to her patients' hearts. This fine-tuned sensitivity, combined with her acute powers of observation, led Taussig to one of the most important discoveries in cardiac care in the twentieth century and to the beginning of open-heart surgery. Taussig determined that a lack of oxygen was the cause of cyanosis, a congenital disorder that caused babies to die very young. She developed a successful surgical technique to correct the problem, and soon cyanosis was virtually wiped out.
-- Dr. Helen Brooke Taussing, 1898-1986.
Source: http://www.africanamericans.com/HelenBrookeTaussig.htm

Jean Taylor

"Something that made an impact on me in my mid-20s was meeting one of the women who had been really popular in high school. High school can be so tough! Kids shouldn't worry so much about the popularity thing---it's not that big a deal. Still, you feel it so much when you're in high school. It's a whole lot better to have lots of good years later instead of three good years in high school."
-- Jean Taylor

Karen K. Uhlenbeck

"I can't say that I was really interested in mathematics as a child or adolescent because one doesn't really understand what mathematics is until at least halfway through college when one takes abstract math courses and learns about proofs. As a child I read a lot, and I read everything. I'd go to the library and then stay up all night reading. I used to read under the desk in school. My whole family were and still are avid readers; we lived in the country so there wasn't a whole lot to do. I was particularly interested in reading about science. I was about twelve years old when my father began bringing home Fred Hoyle's books on astrophysics. I found them very interesting. I also remember a little paperback book called "One, Two, Three, (and, in?) Infinity" by George Gamow, and I remember the excitement of understanding this very sophisticated argument that there were two different kinds of infinities. I read all of the books on science in the library and was frustrated when there was nothing left to read."
-- Karen K. Uhlenbeck, Professor, and Sid W. Richardson Regents Chairholder, Department of Mathematics, University of Texas, Austin.

Lesley Ward

" Getting together in an all-women group can really help. We women graduate students used to meet and take turns giving short talks about our thesis work-in-progress, or about some other interesting math topic. As well as developing our own speaking skills, we got used to seeing women as authorities on technical material."
-- Lesley Ward, Department of Mathematics, Harvey Mudd College, Pomona, CA.

Sharon Alden

"If you are interested in a subject and have a desire to pursue it, you can achieve anything. Don't be discouraged by the opinions of others or their biases. If there are no female role models. Take a male as a role model. Someday you may be a role model to a boy who admires your achievements."
-- Sharon Alden, Lead Forecaster/Meteorologist, National Weather Service/Pocatello, Idaho

Marjorie Lee Browne

Fan Chung

Ingrid Daubechies

Grace Hopper

Inge Lehmann

Barbara McClintock

Cathleen Morawetz

Julia Robinson

Helen Taussig

Karen Uhlenbeck

Lesley Ward

Sharon Alden

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