List of women in mathematics facts for kids

Kids Encyclopedia Facts

This article is about amazing women who have made a big difference in the world of mathematics! These women have done important work in math research, taught others about math, studied the history of math, shared math with the public, and even won math contests.

Trailblazers in Mathematics

Early Pioneers (A-C)

Maria Gaetana Agnesi wrote one of the first calculus textbooks in 1748. She might have been the first female math professor since ancient times.

Maria Gaetana Agnesi (1718–1799) was an Italian mathematician and philosopher. She wrote one of the very first textbooks on calculus in 1748. She was even offered a professorship, which would have made her the first female math professor in a long time!
Kathleen Antonelli (1921–2006) was an Irish-American programmer. She helped program ENIAC, which was one of the very first electronic digital computers.
Hertha Ayrton (1854–1923) was an English engineer, mathematician, physicist, and inventor. She won the Hughes Medal for her scientific work.
Alexandra Bellow (born 1935) is a Romanian mathematician. She has made important contributions to ergodic theory, probability, and analysis.
Mary Cartwright (1900–1998) was a British mathematician. She was one of the first people to study a dynamical system that showed chaos.
Émilie du Châtelet (1706–1749) was a French mathematician and philosopher. She translated and explained Isaac Newton's famous book, Principia Mathematica.
Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat (born 1923) is a French mathematician and physicist. She is a top expert in general relativity and has shown that many physical theories can exist. She was the first woman elected to the French Academy of Sciences.
Maria Chudnovsky (born 1977) is an Israeli-American graph theorist. She was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship for her work.
Fan Chung (born 1949) is a Taiwanese-American researcher. She studies random graphs, which are graphs where connections are made randomly.

Innovators and Educators (D-F)

Ingrid Daubechies is famous for her work on Daubechies wavelets.

Ingrid Daubechies (born 1954) is a Belgian physicist and mathematician. She is well-known for her work on wavelets, which are like small waves used in signal processing.
Christine Darden (born 1942) is an American aeronautical engineer. She researches sonic booms, which are sounds created by objects moving faster than sound.
Alicia Dickenstein (born 1955) is an Argentine algebraic geometer. She is a vice-president of the International Mathematical Union.
Annie Easley (1933–2011) was an African-American computer scientist and mathematician at NASA. She helped calculate trajectories for rockets.
Philippa Fawcett (1868–1948) was an English educator. She became internationally famous for getting the top score on the 1890 Mathematical Tripos exam at Cambridge University.
Marie Farge (born 1953) is a French mathematician and physicist. She is known for her research on wavelets and turbulence in fluid mechanics.
Lisa Fauci (born 1960) is an American applied mathematician. She uses computational fluid dynamics to study biological processes, like how things move in living systems.

Groundbreakers (G-I)

These shapes, discovered in part by Carolyn S. Gordon, show that you can't always "hear the shape of a drum."

The Gray graph, a special type of graph, was discovered by Marion Gray while she worked at AT&T.

Hypatia, an ancient Greek Egyptian mathematician, was a very important figure in her time.

Sophie Germain (1776–1831) was a French number theorist, physicist, and philosopher. She corresponded with famous mathematicians like Carl Friedrich Gauss.
Carolyn S. Gordon (born 1950) is an American geometer. She helped prove that you can't always "hear the shape of a drum," meaning different shapes can sound the same!
Evelyn Boyd Granville (1924–2023) was one of the first African-American women to earn a PhD in mathematics.
Marion Cameron Gray (1902–1979) was a Scottish telephone engineer. She discovered the Gray graph, a special kind of graph.
Mary W. Gray (born 1939) is an American author who writes about mathematics, math education, and fairness.
Euphemia Lofton Haynes (1890–1980) was the first African-American woman to earn a PhD in mathematics.
Grace Hopper (1906–1992) was an American computer scientist and a United States Navy rear admiral. She was a pioneer in computer programming.
Hypatia (died 415 AD) was a very famous ancient Greek Egyptian mathematician. She was the head of a school in Alexandria.

Modern Math Leaders (J-L)

Australian mathematician Nalini Joshi.

Sofya Kovalevskaya is known for her work on differential equations.

Ada Lovelace wrote what is considered the first computer program.

Katherine Johnson (1918–2020) was an American mathematician at NASA. She calculated the paths for Project Mercury and the 1969 Apollo 11 flight to the Moon!
Nalini Joshi is an Australian mathematician who studies differential equations. She is a highly recognized researcher and was president of the Australian Mathematical Society.
Carol Karp (1926–1972) was an American researcher in infinitary logic.
Linda Keen (born 1940) is an American mathematician and computer scientist. She was president of the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM).
Sofya Kovalevskaya (1850–1891) was the first major Russian female mathematician. She worked on analysis, differential equations, and mechanics. Her name is on the Cauchy-Kovalevskaya theorem, a key result for certain equations.
Olga Ladyzhenskaya (1922–2004) was a Soviet mathematician. She proved important things about the Navier–Stokes equations, which describe fluid motion.
Susan Landau (born 1954) is an American mathematician and computer scientist. She is known for her work in internet security.
Ruth Lawrence (born 1971) was a child prodigy. She is a British-Israeli researcher in knot theory and algebraic topology.
Ada Lovelace (1815–1852) is famous for writing what is considered the first computer program. She created an algorithm for Bernoulli numbers for Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine.

Influential Figures (M-P)

Maryam Mirzakhani receiving her Fields Medal in 2014.

Elena Cornaro Piscopia was the first woman to earn a doctoral degree in 1678.

Lisa Piccirillo solved the Conway knot's slicing problem as a student.

Dusa McDuff (born 1945) is an English researcher in symplectic geometry. She was the first woman to give a Hardy Lecture.
Maryam Mirzakhani (1977–2017) was an Iranian mathematician. She was the first woman to win the Fields Medal, which is like the Nobel Prize for mathematics. She studied the symmetry of curved surfaces.
Cathleen Synge Morawetz (1923–2017) was a Canadian-American researcher. She worked on the partial differential equations that describe how fluids flow.
Emmy Noether (1882–1935) was a German mathematician. She is often called "the greatest woman mathematician of all time." She developed modern ring theory and is famous for Noether's theorem, which connects symmetries to conservation laws in physics.
Kathleen Ollerenshaw (1912–2014) was a British mathematician and politician. She was the mayor of Manchester and an education advisor.
Elena Cornaro Piscopia (1646–1684) was an Italian philosopher, musician, and math lecturer. In 1678, she became the first woman ever to earn a doctoral degree.
Lisa Piccirillo is an American low-dimensional topologist. She became famous for solving the Conway knot's slicing problem while she was still a graduate student.
Vera Pless (1931–2020) was an American mathematician. She specialized in combinatorics and coding theory, which is used in error-correcting codes.
Cheryl Praeger (born 1948) is an Australian researcher in group theory and combinatorial designs.

Recent Contributors (R-Z)

Marjorie Rice discovered four new ways to tile a plane with pentagons.

Elena Cornaro Piscopia was the first woman to earn a doctoral degree in 1678.

Daina Taimina uses crochet to show what hyperbolic space looks like.

Karen Uhlenbeck is a leading expert in partial differential equations and mathematical physics.

Katrin Wendland is an expert on singularities in quantum field theories.

Marjorie Rice (1923–2017) was an American amateur mathematician. She famously discovered new ways to tile a surface using pentagons.
Julia Robinson (1919–1985) was an American researcher. She worked on Diophantine equations and helped solve Hilbert's tenth problem.
Mary Ellen Rudin (1924–2013) was an American topologist. She created many interesting examples in topology.
Jean E. Sammet (1928–2017) was an American computer scientist. She helped develop COBOL, an early computer programming language.
Doris Schattschneider (born 1939) is an American mathematician. She is known for writing about tessellations (patterns of shapes that fit together) and the art of M. C. Escher.
Charlotte Scott (1858–1931) was a British mathematician. She helped promote math education for women in America.
Mary Somerville (1780–1872) was a Scottish science writer and a very smart person who knew a lot about many subjects. She was one of the first two women to become a member of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Daina Taimiņa (born 1954) is a Latvian-American mathematician. She is famous for crocheting objects to show what hyperbolic space looks like.
Olga Taussky-Todd (1906–1995) was an Austrian and Czech-American mathematician. She was a big supporter of matrix theory.
Jean Taylor (born 1944) is an American mathematician. She is known for her work on soap bubbles and crystals.
Karen Uhlenbeck (born 1942) is an American mathematician. She is a leading expert in partial differential equations and has worked on many topics related to mathematical physics. She won the Abel Prize, another very high honor in mathematics.
Maryna Viazovska (born 1984) is a Ukrainian mathematician. She solved the sphere packing problems in dimensions 8 and 24, which are very complex math puzzles.
Dorothy Vaughan (1910–2008) was an African-American mathematician at NASA. She was one of the "human computers" who performed calculations for early space missions.
Katrin Wendland (born 1970) is a German mathematical physicist. She is an expert on singularities in quantum field theories.
Sijue Wu (born 1964) is a Chinese-American expert in the mathematics of water waves.
Sara Zahedi (born 1981) is an Iranian-Swedish researcher in computational fluid dynamics. She was a child refugee and later won the European Mathematical Society Prize.

Images for kids

Alexandra Bellow has contributed to ergodic theory, probability and analysis.
Annie Easley (1933–2011), human computer at NASA.
Emmy Noether has been called "the greatest woman mathematician of all time". In the early 1920s she developed the modern formulation of ring theory. She is also known for a result in the calculus of variations known as Noether's theorem, which relates symmetries to conservation laws.