AWM Book Review:

Notable Women in Mathematics: A Biographical Dictionary

Charlene Morrow and Teri Perl, editors, Greenwood Press, Westport CT 1998. xv+302. ISBN 0-313-29131-4 (cloth), $49.95.

From: AWM Newsletter, January/February 1999.

Reviewed by: Marge Murray, Book Review Editor, Department of Mathematics, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061-0123; email: murray@calvin.math.vt.edu.

Here at my home institution, Virginia Tech, I regularly teach our one-semester upper-level course in the history of mathematics, which is taken primarily by seniors majoring in mathematics or mathematics education. It's quite a challenge to present -- in fourteen weeks -- an overview of the high points of the historical development of mathematics, while at the same time conveying a sense of the social, cultural, intellectual, and political foundations of the subject. It is a still greater challenge to describe the explosive growth of mathematics, and of the mathematical community, over the past hundred years or so.

But perhaps the greatest challenge that I face, as a woman teaching a roughly equal mix of male and female students, is to explain the stunning absence of women from the story of mathematics -- and, in particular, the yawning gap between the death of Hypatia (in the early 5th century AD) and the appearance of talented amateur mathematicians such as Emilie du Chatelet and Maria Agnesi (in the early 18th century). Why were women absent from mathematical activity for so long, and what were the social and cultural conditions which facilitated their reappearance? How can I convey to my students the truly stunning transformation over the past 125 years, during which time women have become significant, indeed central, participants in the mathematical enterprise?

It is difficult to address these complex issues in a one-semester class, but many of my students choose to explore them further in research papers that they write throughout the semester. Every year, growing numbers of my female students -- though, regrettably, none of their male classmates -- express interest in researching and writing about the lives of women in mathematics. The volume under review, Notable Women in Mathematics, edited by Morrow and Perl, provides a helpful starting point for those students eager to know more about the contributions of women -- particularly contemporary women -- to mathematical research and education.

Notable Women in Mathematics is a collection of fifty-nine short biographies of women mathematicians. According to the book jacket blurb, the book is "designed for secondary school students and the general public." Reading through the individual biographical essays, however, the level of discussion seems more appropriate to the students in my history of mathematics course. The profiles seem to address the questions that a young woman completing an undergraduate major in mathematics might have about her future place in the mathematical community: whether to go on to graduate school; how to combine career and family life; whether to concentrate upon research or upon teaching. The profiles tend to downplay the more technical aspects of mathematical research, but do seem to require at least a modicum of "mathematical maturity" on the part of the reader.

The current volume invites comparison to a 1987 Greenwood Press publication (still in print), Women of Mathematics: A Biobibliographic Sourcebook, edited by Louise Grinstein and Paul Campbell. The Grinstein-Campbell volume is a much more historically oriented work, profiling those women who have had a lasting impact upon mathematics and the mathematical community, emphasizing the contributions of women to research mathematics and providing extensive bibliographic references. By contrast, Morrow and Perl endeavor to show the great _variety_ of women involved in the mathematical enterprise. While their book includes biographies of many of the early pioneers (Hypatia, du Chatelet, Germain, Lovelace, Kovalevskaya), well over half of the women profiled here were born after 1920, the majority of these after 1940.

This emphasis on contemporary mathematicians leads to some puzzling omissions. For example, the book includes a profile of Christine Ladd-Franklin, the first woman to complete all the requirements for the Ph.D. in mathematics at an American university. Ladd-Franklin was admitted to graduate study at Johns Hopkins in 1878 and had completed all the requirements for the Ph.D. by 1882, but Hopkins refused to award her the degree until 1926. However, the book does _not_ include a profile of Winifred Edgerton Merrill, who in 1886 became the first woman to receive a mathematics Ph.D. from an American institution. While the book includes the British-born and educated Charlotte Angas Scott, founding head of the mathematics department at Bryn Mawr College, it omits her illustrious and influential successor, Anna Pell Wheeler. In fact, Morrow and Perl overlook nearly all of the well over 200 American women who earned Ph.D.'s in mathematics prior to 1940, profiling just four of these: Pauline Sperry, Mina Rees, Grace Hopper, and Ladd-Franklin.

The book includes the first three African-American women to earn Ph.D.'s in mathematics -- Evelyn Granville, Marjorie Lee Browne, and Gloria Hewitt -- along with Vivian Malone-Mayes, the first Black faculty member at Baylor University in Houston. Although the jacket blurb says that the book includes profiles of Latina mathematicians, these do not seem to be greatly in evidence; Cora Sadosky, born in Argentina, seems to be the only woman included who is of Latin American descent. An effort is made to include Asian, European, and Australian women as well, but the vast majority of these women has lived and worked in the United States at one time or another. Because nearly all of the contributors are from the United States, the biographical profiles are clearly filtered through an American lens.

Morrow and Perl include among their subjects some of the most distinguished women in American mathematics since 1950. They include Julia Robinson and Cathleen Morawetz, the first two women to be elected to the mathematics section of the National Academy of Sciences, and the first two women to serve as President of the American Mathematical Society; Karen Uhlenbeck and Nancy Kopell, both of whom have won prestigious MacArthur Foundation fellowships. They also include scholars in the field of gender studies in mathematics education (Elizabeth Fennema and Gilah Leder) and at least one historian of mathematics (Karen Parshall). Also included are brief biographies of the founders and presidents of the AWM, and of many (but not all) of the AWM Noether Lecturers.

Naturally enough, in a book of this size and scope there are a few editorial oversights and errors. For example, Mina Rees died in October 1997 while this book was going to press; her death is, as a consequence, not noted. The profile of Hypatia which is included in this volume fails to make reference to some of the recent scholarship on her life and work, most notably that of Maria Dzielska and Michael A.B. Deakin (see my review in the May/Jun 1996 issue of this Newsletter). Since this work is easily accessible to undergraduate students in mathematics, it would have been nice to have seen it mentioned.

In addition, it would have been nice to see some mention of those women who, while trained in mathematics, have made significant contributions to statistics. I, for one, would have enjoyed reading profiles of Gertrude Cox, Elizabeth Scott, and Florence Nightingale David. Finally, in a volume that strives for diversity as well as insight into the personal lives of women in mathematics, it would have been nice to know more about how individual women actually dealt with conflicts between career and family life, and about those women who -- whether by choice or by chance -- did not marry and have children. What are the advantages and disadvantages faced by women who lead non-traditional lifestyles? (For more on this issue, see Mary Beth Ruskai's excellent article, "Myths about the role of marital status..." in the May/Jun 1994 issue of this Newsletter).

Despite these shortcomings, Notable Women of Mathematics is a valuable resource for students and mathematics educators alike. It provides valuable insight into the variety of ways in which women -- especially contemporary women in the United States -- have created a niche for themselves in the world of mathematics.