Katherine Johnson was born in 1918 in West Virginia. She loved mathematics as a child, and her family moved 125 miles so that she could attend school. She graduated from high school at the age of 14, and a year later enrolled at West Virginia State University. At 18,...
It was Emmy Noether’s intent to teach French and English, but instead she chose to audit math classes at the University of Erlangen in Germany (where her father was a mathematics professor). She earned her Ph.D in 1907, and spent the next seven years teaching at...
Sofia Kovalevskaya made a variety of original contributions to the field of mathematics. She was the first important Russian female mathematician, the first woman to receive a full professorship in Northern Europe, and one of the first women to be an editor at a...
Born in Milan in 1718, Maria Gaetana Agnesi was recognized for her intelligence from a very early age. By the time she was 11, she could speak seven languages: Italian, French, Greek, Hebrew, Spanish, German, and Latin, the last of which she used to give a speech (at...