Resources on Women Mathematicians

Photo of Eighteen Women with PhD’s in Mathematics at the NMAH in 1981
Museum Conference for Women with PhD's in Mathematics, 1981. (81-11284-15)

Much of the information about Francis Baker, Olive C. Hazlett, Grace Hopper, and Sr. Helen Sullivan is based on the work of Judy Green and Jeanne LaDuke. Green and LaDuke were Honorary Research Associates at NMAH in the 1980s and helped organize the 1981 NMAH meeting that honored American women with pre-World War II PhD’s in mathematics.

Case, Bettye Anne Case, and Anne M. Leggett. Complexities: Women in Mathematics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.

Green, Judy, and Jeanne LaDuke. Pioneering Women in American Mathematics: The Pre-1940 PhD’s. Providence, RI: American Mathematical Society, 2009. This book contains short biographical essays on Baker, Hazlett, Hopper, and Sullivan.

Green, Judy, and Jeanne LaDuke. “Supplementary Material for Pioneering Women in American Mathematics: The Pre-1940 PhD’s,” American Mathematical Society, http://www.ams.org/publications/authors/books/postpub/hmath-34-PioneeringWomen.pdf.This searchable file contains extensive biographies and bibliographies of all 228 American women who received PhD’s in mathematics before 1940. Each entry, including those for Baker, Hazlett, Hopper, and Sullivan contains a list of references to the individual.

Grinstein, Louise S., and Paul J. Campbell, eds. Women of Mathematics: A Biobibliographic Sourcebook. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1987. Among the essays in this book is one on Hopper.

Henrion, Claudia. Women in Mathematics: The Addition of Difference. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997.

Murray, Margaret A. M. Women Becoming Mathematicians: Creating a Professional Identity in Post-World War II America. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000.

Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History, Archives Center, Computer Oral History Collection. Transcripts of some interviews, including five interviews with Hopper, are available at http://invention.smithsonian.org/resources/fa_comporalhist_index.aspx. Other women mathematicians interviewed were Gertrude Blanche and Ida Rhodes of Mathematical Tables Project and Mina Rees of the Office of Naval Research. In all, about ten women were interviewed for this project.

 Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History, Archives Center, Grace Murray Hopper Collection, 1944-1965.   A description of the collection is available at http://amhistory.si.edu/archives/d8324.htm.

Williams, Scott W. “Black Women in Mathematics,” Mathematics Department of the State University of New York at Buffalo, http://www.math.buffalo.edu/mad/wmad0.html. This website is part of the more comprehensive website Mathematicians of the African Diaspora.

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