Celebrating Women in Mathematics

By  Eleanor F. , Edward Gryspeerdt and Hanna Waigh

Here at OUP Education, our international publishing team has been busy putting together innovative, engaging, and up-to-date resources for the new Cambridge IGCSE Mathematics syllabus. Each chapter of our brand-new IGCSE Mathematics student books start with introductions to people that have contributed to the advancements of mathematical knowledge and practice. While developing the student books, editors Eleanor Field and Edward Gryspeerdt ensured women mathematicians were included and celebrated in the text. Find out more about some of the influential women within mathematics history below. 

Sophie Germain (1776–1831) was a French mathematician. Because it was not then considered appropriate for a woman to learn mathematics, as a child she secretly read books from her father’s library. She also wrote to famous mathematicians such as Karl Gauss, using the male pseudonym Monsieur LeBlanc. She became a great mathematician, and in 1816 she became the first woman to win a prize from the Paris Academy of Sciences for her essay on elasticity theory.

Ingrid Daubechies (1954−) is a Belgian physicist and mathematician, best known for her work on image compression technology. Her work has also enabled scientists to extract information from samples of bones and teeth. The image processing methods she has helped to develop can be used to establish the age and authenticity of works of art and have been used on paintings by artists such as Vincent van Gogh and Rembrandt.

Maryam Mirzakhani (1977 – 2017) was the first woman ever to be awarded the Fields Medal, the most prestigious award in mathematics, for outstanding work on the geometry of curved surfaces. On a curved surface, the shortest distance between two points is not a straight line but is part of a curve called a geodesic. Mirzakhani became fascinated with surfaces which are saddle shaped, and in 2004 she solved a problem related to how many geodesics these kinds of surfaces have.

Katherine Johnson (1918–2020) was an American mathematician who worked for NASA. Her orbital calculations were critical to the success of many spaceflights, including the Apollo missions to the moon in the 1960s. She was one of the first black American women to work as a scientist at NASA. The story of her life was made into a film called Hidden Figures and, in 2015, President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Florence Nightingale (1820–1910) was a nurse during the Crimean War, which took place between 1853 and 1856. She is generally considered to have founded the modern nursing profession, by establishing her own nursing school at St Thomas’ Hospital in London in 1860. She was also a gifted mathematician, and used statistical diagrams to illustrate the conditions that existed in the hospitals where she worked. Although she did not invent the pie chart, she popularised its use, along with other diagrams such as the rose diagram, which is like a circular histogram. In 1859, she was elected the first female member of the Royal Statistical Society.

Are there women mathematicians you are influenced by or talk about in the classroom? We would love to hear about them in the comments!