Women Are Mathematicians Too! Trivia Quiz

Answer: Hypatia

Hypatia lived from around 370 to 415 AD. Her father was a respected philosopher in Alexandria, and trained his daughter to follow in his footsteps. It was not long before she surpassed him, and her eloquence and wisdom made her quite influential. This made many people jealous, and early Christians denounced her for her identification with early Greek philosophers (most of whom were still pagan at the time).

She was murdered by an angry mob in 415.

Answer: Emilie du Chatelet

Emilie du Chatelet was born in 1706 into an aristocratic family. She married a high ranking nobleman who allowed her to develop her skills as a mathematician, scientist, and translator. The famous French writer Voltaire, a personal friend of Emilie, wrote the introduction to her translation of Newton's "Principia". She died in 1749.

Answer: Maria Gaetana Agnesi

Maria Gaetana Agnesi's father was a professor of mathematics at the University of Bologna. She was clearly an extremely bright and talented young lady, and her talents in math were mirrored by those in languages, as she became quite fluent in Greek, Latin and Hebrew as well as French and Spanish at a young age.

Analytical Institutions took Maria 10 years to write. It was so well written that it was translated into both French and English and has been used extensively as a textbook - the oldest such influential writing by a woman that has survived. Shortly after her work was published, she retired from intellectual pursuits and devoted the rest of her life to sick and poor. She died in 1799.

Answer: Sophie Germain

Sophie Germain was born to an upper class Parisian family in 1776. Her family was very opposed to her education, even going to the lengths of hiding her clothes and denying her light and heat while sttudying. However, she persevered with her studies and eventually made the acquaintence of Lagrange (after first submitting a paper to him using a male pen name) and Gauss - two of the most prominent mathematicians of the early 1800s.

Her 1816 paper on the calculus of variations was given a grand prize by the French Academy, and her pioneering work on vibrating elastic surfaces has been used to help engineers and scientists solve a variety of problems in buiding construction. Her work, for example, was used to assist engineers as they built the Eiffel Tower. She died in 1831.

Answer: Sonya Kovalevsky

Sonya Kovalevsky was born in 1850 in Russia, but women were forbidden to study there at the time. She moved to Germany in order to pursue her studies and, with special permission, was allowed to take a PhD at the University of Göttingen in 1874. She studied under Weierstrass, one of Germany's foremost mathematicians of the late 1800's.

In 1883 she became the first female lecturer at Stockholm University, and six years later was named professor for life there. She was also a gifted writer. Her autobiography, "The Rayevsky Sisters", was critically acclaimed.

She died at the age of 41, in 1891.

Answer: Grace Chisholm Young

Grace Young was born in 1868 to an upper class family. She attended Girton College in Cambridge, and received the first doctorate awarded to a woman at Göttingen University on the same basis as for men. She was remarkable in that she had six children with her husband, William Young (also a mathematician), and yet was able to publish numerous papers on calculus, a textbook entitled The First Book of Geometry, and the first book on set theory.

In 1915 she won the Gamble Prize at Cambridge University for a long essay on calculus series.

She died in 1944.

Answer: Emmy Noether

Emmy Noether was born in 1882 in Erlangen, Germany. Her father, Max Noether, was a distinguished mathematician who encouraged his daughter's studies in mathematics. As a young woman she was soon lecturing for her father when he had to be absent from class. She eventually became a teacher at Göttingen University, but her Jewish heritage and liberal thinking led to her dismissal by the Nazi régime, so she immigrated to the United States, where she found work at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania in 1933.

As a mathematician Noether studied abstract algebra, and discovered relationships among problems that had not appeared before. She was recognized by Albert Einstein as a genius. She died suddenly in 1935.

Answer: Evelyn Boyd Granville

Evelyn Boyd Granville was born in 1924 and raised in Washington D.C. in a segregated school system. Here she flourished and developed a love of mathematics, and with help from her aunt and a scholarship, she entered the university system. Her work ethic and mathematical aptitude allowed her to continue her studies until she had earned a PhD in Mathematics from Yale - becoming one of the first black women to be granted a Mathematics PhD in the United States.

Her work in Washington D.C. with the National Bureau of Standards on missle fuzes led to a programming job with IBM, where she went on to become part of the team that developed the orbit computations and computer programming for NASA's Project Vanguard and Project Mercury. She later also contributed to Project Apollo while with the North American Aviation Company.

Though no longer involved with IBM or the space program, she continues to make significant contributions in the teaching of mathematics and through volunteer work.

Answer: Florence Nightingale

Florence Nightingale was widely recognized for her work in the development of nursing and hospital reform. However, her understanding of mathematics was also quite strong, particularly in the area of statistics. In order to highlight the need for reform in hospitals she became quite adept at gathering and displaying statistics, inventing polar area charts, in which the area of the wedge in a circular diagram is proportional to the statistic it represents.

Though she is not generally recognized today as a mathematician, whe was recognized by the mathematicians of her time. She was a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society and an honorary member of American Statistical Association. She remained actively involved in pushing for improvements in healthcare until her death at age 90 in 1910.

Answer: Grace Hopper

Grace Hopper was born in 1906 and earned a PhD in mathematics from Yale University in 1934. She joined the U.S. Navy during WWII, where she worked with the MARK I computer and its successors. It was during this time that she and her team are sometimes credited for coming up with term "bug" after finding a moth in one of the MARK II's relays. She is also credited with coining the phrase "debug" in reference to fixing errors in the programming code.

In 1966 she retired from the Naval reserves, but was recalled within months for a six month reinstatement to active duty that was later extended indefinitely. She eventually was elevated to the rank of Rear-Admiral, and retired for good at the age of 80 in 1986, the oldest active duty officer at that time. She died in 1992, having been one of the most influential mathematicians of twentieth century.