Inspire the Girls in Your Life With These Eleven Female Mathematicians

Mathnasium is proud to be part of the nationwide movement to interest more girls in math. We encourage parents to promote their daughters’ interest in math. In the past, women did not have access to higher education and careers in math, which created a field dominated by males. Now there is a barrier for girls because of a lack of female math role models.

The lack of female role models in math creates an environment where young girls often do not identify math as something women do and enjoy. Exposing girls to successful female mathematicians shows that gender has nothing to do with math interest or ability. While women in a girl’s daily life are the primary role models, women who made big contributions to math may inspire girls to reach for the stars.

We found eleven women that may inspire your girl to pursue math as a passion. She may want to use one of these women as the subject of a school report. Even kids who don’t seem enthusiastic about math should know about women’s contributions in math.

Some of the women in this list loved math as a child, while others didn’t discover math as a passion until later. Each of them used math to make a positive impact on the world.

Find the mathematician that most closely matches your daughter’s interests and then learn more about that inspiring woman. This list is just a sample of the many inspirational women in math.

1.  Ada Lovelace (1815- 1852) worked with Babbage to write the first computer program for the Analytical Engine. She was the daughter of the famous poet Lord Byron, but he abandoned her as an infant. She had health problems throughout her life and died at only thirty-six years old.

2.  Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) is most famous for nursing soldiers during the Crimean War. The soldiers called her “The Lady with the Lamp” because she would visit their bedside to care for their wounds with a lamp. Although her work as a nurse was important, her work as a statistician has probably saved more lives. She showed how disease spreads using data represented visually. Her data greatly improved poor hygiene practices in hospitals and therefore reduced the spread of infectious diseases in hospitals.

3.  Sofia Kovalevskaya (1850-1891) had such a passion for math that she didn’t let society stop her from studying, teaching and writing about math. Her math contributions helped further astronomer’s understanding of Saturn.

4.  Amalie Emmy Noether (1882-1935) was a German mathematician known for her contributions to abstract Algebra and Noether’s theorem. Noether’s theorem about symmetry in nature is a foundational work in modern physics.  She was a contemporary of Albert Einstein and he wrote in New York Times,

“In the judgment of the most competent living mathematicians, Fräulein Noether was the most significant creative mathematical genius … she discovered methods which have proved of enormous importance in the development of the present-day younger generation of mathematicians.”

As a Jewish woman when the Nazi Party was powerful, she faced many odds personally and professionally. In fact, she often was not paid for her work and published many papers under a man’s name.

5.  Olga Taussky-Todd (1906-1995) called herself the “torchbearer for matrix theory.” She wrote hundreds of research papers on algebraic number theory and matrices. Her college and university students said she was a fabulous math teacher, and she was the supervisor of Caltech’s first female Ph.D. student in math. She met Emmy Noether at the Gottingen Mathematics Institute and then they met up again at the prestigious Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania after fleeing Europe.

6.  Mary Cartwright (1900-1998) was not an immediate success in math. Her first love was history. She ended up going to college for math, but almost quit math when she did not do well on her math exams.

Mary did continue in math and went on to make significant contributions to British radio technology during World War II. Many current mathematicians consider her work to be the start of chaos theory. Unfortunately, she was ahead of her time and the math community in the 1940s failed to recognize it as a mathematical breakthrough until Edward Lorenz furthered the work in the early 1960s to predict weather.

Mary received many honors for her work, including the title “Dame Commander of the British Empire” - the female equivalent to the rank of knight.

7.  Marjorie Lee Browne (1914-1979) was the third African-American woman to earn a Ph.D. in math. She saw that math education, especially for women and minority students, needed improvement. Due to her work improving math education, she received the W.W. Rankin Memorial Award for Excellence in Mathematics Education from the North Carolina Council of Teachers of Mathematics.

8.   Katherine Johnson (born in 1918) Katherine overcame many obstacles as an African-American woman in the South. Her story was one of three featured in the movie Hidden Figures.

9.  Julia Robinson (1919- 1985) had rheumatic fever as a child, which led to fragile health throughout her life. She worked for decades to solve a problem known as Hilbert’s Tenth Problem. She finally decided that the problem was unsolvable. She was the first woman elected as president of the American Mathematical Society.

10. Maryam Mirzakhani (1977-2017) wanted to become a writer and never thought much about math until her last year in high school.  Her work on non-Euclidian geometry exploring space and time concepts helped her become the first woman and first Iranian to receive the Fields Medal.

11. Danica McKellar (born in 1975) is an actor and author of a series of math books. She encourages young girls in math and makes the subject cool. We like the series Danica wrote because it is written in a witty, magazine style that young ladies will appreciate. The series includes:
Math Doesn’t Suck: How to Survive Middle School Math Without Losing Your Mind or Breaking a Nail Best for struggling 7th-9th graders
Kiss my Math: Showing Pre-Algebra Who’s Boss Best for 7th-9th graders
Hot X: Algebra Exposed! Best for girls entering algebra
Girls Get Curves: Geometry Takes Shape Best for girls entering geometry

Many of these women followed their passion for math despite tremendous odds.

We hope these women inspire the girls in your life in math. Math and related fields will benefit when more girls and women contribute their brainpower. Remember that female teachers and relatives are your girl's the most important role models because they have the potential to show girls on a daily basis that math can be rewarding.

If your daughter needs more positive female math role models in her daily life, bring her by to meet us at Mathnasium of Littleton. We are woman-owned and have many accomplished female instructors.

For further information read some or our articles about girls in math:

· Sofia Kovalevskaya: The Girl Who Wouldn’t Give Up on Math

· Mathnasium of Littleton Encourages Girls & Young Women to Pursue STEM Opportunities

· The Way We Teach Math Is Holding Women Back

· Something to Consider if Your Elementary Age Daughter Has a Female Teacher

· Mathematician Spotlight: Katherine G Johnson

For a more exhaustive list of female mathematicians go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_women_in_mathematics

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