Maryam Mirzakhani
Maryam Mirzakhani was an Iranian mathematician born on May 3rd, 1977 in Tehrān, Iran. From the time she was in high school, she pursued her interest in STEM by participating in the 1994 and 1995 International Mathematical Olympiads for high school students and even won gold medals in both. In 1999, she received her Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics from the Sharif University of Technology in Tehrān. Five years later, she earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University. For four years, from 2004 to 2008, Mirzakhani served as a Clay Mathematics Institute research fellow and an assistant professor of mathematics at Princeton University, and in 2008, she became a professor at Stanford University.
Mirzakhani’s work focused primarily on the study of hyperbolic surfaces through their moduli spaces. Her research involved calculating the number of a certain type of geodesic, a curve representing the shortest path between two points on a surface, on hyperbolic surfaces. Her findings concluded that a property of the modulus space corresponds to the number of simple closed geodesics of the hyperbolic surface. In 2014, Mirzakhani won the quadrennial Fields Medal, which is known as the most prestigious award in mathematics. Unfortunately, Mirzakhani passed away in 2017 after battling breast cancer for around four years.
Evelyn Boyd Granville
Evelyn Boyd Granville was born on May 1st, 1924 in Washington, D.C. She was known as only the second African American woman to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics from an American University. From her time as a young girl in school, Granville was an excellent student and even aspired to become a teacher. In high school, she was largely encouraged by two of her mathematics teachers and continued her studies of the subject when she attended Smith College in 1941. In 1945, she was offered a place at Yale University, from which she received her doctorate and became one of the first Black women to do so. Following her education, she worked in various positions such as an instructor and even taking on an associate professorship.
Granville specialized primarily in the analysis and interplay of complex equations and variables. During the time, this was a valuable skill, due to the fact that NASA was looking to obtain early mainframe computers to give them an advantage against the Soviets during the Space Race. In 1956, Granville was recruited by IBM to program a data-processing unit. She continued to work on several missions and programs with NASA and IBM, being among the small portion of Black women involved in the space program. Dr. Granville sadly passed away on June 27, 2023 at the age of 99.
Cathleen Synge Morawetz
Cathleen Synge Morawetz was born on May 5th, 1923 in Toronto, Canada. Both of her parents had experience in mathematics, with her father being a mathematician and her mother having some education in the subject. After receiving a scholarship, Morawetz attended the University of Toronto to study mathematics. She undertook work as a technical assistant during World War II, returning to the University of Toronto in 1945 to be awarded her bachelors degree in mathematics. After marrying Herbert Morawetz, a chemist, she attended Massachusetts Institute of Technology to receive her master’s degree in 1946. Due to there being few opportunities for a job in mathematics, Morawetz was at first hesitant about pursuing the career. For a brief period, she was a research associate at MIT before attending Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University in 1952, also as a research associate. She was then steadily promoted to associate professor.
Throughout her career, Morawetz made many pioneering contributions towards the theory of partial differential equations and wave propagation. These achievements led to applications in aerodynamics, acoustics, and optics. Through her research at NYU, she discovered that geometrical optics could be used to determine the acoustics and electromagnetic fields scattered by objects. Later on, she was awarded Outstanding Woman Scientist by the Association of Women in Science and held a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1998, Morawetz became the first woman to receive the National Medal of Science. The mathematician unfortunately died on August 8, 2017 at 94 years old.
Dorothy Vaughan
Dorothy Vaughan was born on September 20th, 1910 in Kansas City, Missouri. She was an American mathematician and computer programmer and is best known as the first African American manager at NASA in its early years. Vaughan earned her degree in mathematics from Wilberforce University in 1929. She then began working as a math teacher in Virginia but had to leave the position at the height of World War II in 1943, joining what was NASA at the time, National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). The team was referred to as the “human computers” and would carry out complex calculations and analysis of data for aerospace engineers. However, the sector Vaughan worked in was heavily segregated, and black employees were forced to use separate facilities.
Vaughan served as the head of the sector she was a part of, known as the West Computers, up until 1958. She then joined the NASA Analysis and Computation Division, a team made up of men and women of all races. She quickly became an expert at FORTRAN, a computer programmer. Vaughan retired from NASA in 1971. Several decades later, a 2016 book by Margot Lee Shetterly—Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race—called attention to the contributions of Vaughan and other Black women apart from the West Computers. The book was then made into a film, in which Vaughan was played by Octavia Spencer. Dorothy Vaughan passed away on November 10, 2008, in Hampton, Virginia, at the age of 98.
Mary Cartwright
Mary Cartwright was born on December 17th, 1900 in Aynho, Northamptonshire, England. During her final year in school, though primarily interested in history, she was largely encouraged to pursue her studies of mathematics, and she soon after realized she wanted to study it in university. Cartwright began at St. Hugh’s College in Oxford in 1919, entering as one of only five women studying mathematics in the school at the time. In 1923, she graduated from St. Hugh’s with a first class degree. Before returning to Oxford to complete her Ph.D, Cartwright taught in various schools. Her doctoral thesis was called “The Zeros of Integral Functions of Special Types” and in 1930, she continued working on the topic at Girton College, Cambridge after being awarded a Yarrow Research Fellowship.
Cartwright worked on cluster sets in the theory of functions of one complex variable, her findings later producing Cartwright’s Theorem. Edward Lorenz came across these findings and built them into the foundations of chaos theory, also widely related to the butterfly effect, based on the premise that complex systems such as weather patterns can sometimes be chaotic, without any predictability. Cartwright was the first woman to receive the Sylvester Medal and the first woman to serve on the Council of the Royal Society. She also became the first female president of the London Mathematical Society. Overall, Cartwright was a pioneer in many different ways. She died on April 3rd, 1998 in Cambridge. She was 97 years old.
Works Cited
White, Martin L. “Maryam Mirzakhani.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, inc., 12 June 2024, http://www.britannica.com/biography/Maryam-Mirzakhani.
Myers, Andrew, and Bjorn Carey. “Maryam Mirzakhani, Mathematician and Fields Medal Winner, Dies at Stanford.” Stanford Report, news.stanford.edu/stories/2017/07/maryam-mirzakhani-stanford-mathematician-and-fields-medal-winner-dies. Accessed 3 July 2024.
Murphy, Brian. “Evelyn Boyd Granville, Mathematician Who Broke Barriers, Dies at 99 – The Washington Post.” Evelyn Boyd Granville, Barrier-Breaking Mathematician, Dies at 99, http://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2023/07/14/evelyn-boyd-granville-mathematician-black-dies/. Accessed 6 July 2024.
O’Connor, J.J., and E.F. Robertson. “Evelyn Boyd Granville – Biography.” Evelyn Boyd Granville, mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Granville/. Accessed 6 July 2024.
O’Connor, J.J., and E.F. Robertson. “Cathleen Morawetz – Biography.” Maths History, mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Morawetz/. Accessed 10 July 2024.
“Dorothy Vaughan.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, inc., http://www.britannica.com/biography/Dorothy-Vaughan. Accessed 10 July 2024.
“Dorothy J. Vaughan.” NASA, NASA, 28 June 2024, http://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/langley/dorothy-j-vaughan/.
Chow, Rony. “Mary Lucy Cartwright: The Inspired Mathematician behind Chaos Theory.” History of Data Science, 3 Dec. 2021, http://www.historyofdatascience.com/mary-lucy-cartwright-the-inspired-mathematician-behind-chaos-theory/.
About the Author
Hey! I’m Audrey May, and I’m a rising senior living in North Carolina. I have always loved STEM topics, mostly biology and chemistry, and continue studying them both in and outside of school. I plan to go to college for biology or chemistry and pursue a career in STEM. Currently, I am most interested in a career in marine biology and/or scientific diving and have recently received my scuba certification! I am very passionate about women’s contributions towards advancements and research in STEM and believe they should be thoroughly recognized.
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