History of Mathmatics written by Women

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On Friday, September 21, the NPR show "Science Friday" featured a story on "Girls, Women, and Math." The second hour of the show featured a segment on the eight high school girls who represented the US at the China Girls Mathematical Olympiad (see next item). Guests included team member Jennifer Iglesias and one of the team coaches, Melanie Wood. Also appearing on the show was Dr. Maria Klawe, president of Harvey Mudd College and a Ph.D. mathematician, and actress Danica McKellar. For more information on both women, see the entries below. Information about the NRP show and podcasts of the show are available at www.sciencefriday.com.

Sherry Gong, a 12th grader at the Phillip Exeter Academy in Exeter, N.H., earned a gold medal and tied for first place at the 2007 China Mathematical Olympiad for Girls, held in Wuhan, China, August 11-16 . Sherry had previously tied for second in the 2007 USA Mathematical Olympiad where she was the only girl among the top twelve winners. After a second rigorous team selection test, she was one of six members chosen to represent the United States at the 2007 International Mathematics Olympiad in Hanoi, Vietnam, July 19-30 . Sherry was a member of two previous International Mathematics Olympiad teams when she competed with the 2005 U.S. team and the 2004 Puerto Rican team. She will enter Harvard University this fall. For more details about the 2007 Olympiad, see the story at MAA Online. Read more about Sherry Gong when she was named the 2005 Clay Olympiad Scholar in recognition of the most original solution to a problem on the 2005 USA Mathematics Olympiad.

The actress Danica McKellar, perhaps better known as Winnie from The Wonder Years, has written a math book for middle school girls called "Math Doesn't Suck".§ Read the Newsweek article in the August 6, 2007 , issue. Danica graduated with highest honors from UCLA with a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics, and is the co-author of a mathematical research paper published in the Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and General. Her accomplishments in mathematics have been profiled in the New York Times, July 19, 2005 (section F). Listen to her February 11th interview on NRP Weekend Edition in which she discusses this paper. Or visit the mathematics link on her website to read about her interest in mathematics.

Frances E. Allen, who earned a masters in mathematics from the University of Michigan and is currently a fellow emerita of the T. J. Watson Research Center, received the 2006 A. M. Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery for her "pioneering contributions to the theory and practice of optimizing compiler techniques that laid the foundation for modern optimizing compilers and automatic parallel execution." She is the first woman to be honored with the Turing Award. For more information, see the ACM press release or the links about Allen. The ACM Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory awarded its Knuth Prize to Nancy Lynch (Ph.D. in mathematics from MIT) of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for her "influential contributions to the theory of distributed systems" and for her "seminal impact on the reliability of distributed computing systems." She is the first woman to receive the award. See the ACM press release.

Maria Klawe, who received her B.S. and PhD in mathematics from the University of Alberta, was inaugurated as the first woman President of Harvey Mudd College on February 2, 2007 . For more information, see the story at MAA Online.

Ramdorai Sujatha of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research has been awarded the 2006 Srinivasa Ramanujan Prize for Young Mathematicians from Developing Countries by the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) and the International Mathematical Union (IMU) for her work on the arithmetic of algebraic varieties and her contributions to noncommutative Iwasawa theory. For more information, read the press release or an article from the BBC News.

Michelle Sikes, a mathematical economics major at Wake Forest University, was chosen as a 2007 Rhodes Scholar. She plans to study Global Health Science at Oxford University. Read more about Michelle in the Wake Forest press release.

Sarah Flannery gained fame when as a sixteen year old she became the winner of the 1998 Esat Young Scientist Exhibition and received both the 1999 Irish Young Scientist of the Year Award and the European Young Scientist of the Year Award for her work in the development of the Cayley-Purser algorithm in cryptography. In 2002 Sarah wrote a book called In Code: A Mathematical Journey about public-key cryptography, her work in developing this algorithm, and her enjoyment in solving mathematical puzzles. In 2003 she graduated from Peterhouse College of the University of Cambridge with a BA degree in computer science, went to work for Wolfram Research, and now works for Electronic Arts, a leading video game developer and publisher. Read a review of Sarah's book from the 2003 Notices of the American Mathematical Society.

On May 23, 2006 , the Swedish mathematician Lennart Carleson received the Abel Prize for 2006 from the Queen of Norway. The next day Carleson presented his Abel Lecture. Three other prominent mathematicians were invited to give lectures in honor of the Abel Laureate. Two of these were Lai-Sang Young from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, who spoke on "A mathematical theory of strange attractors," and Sun-Yang Alice Chang from Princeton University, who spoke on "Conformal invariants and differential equations." Read more about the 2006 Abel Prize.

The TV show The Simpsons often contains references to mathematics. A show called Girls Just Want to Have Sums aired on Sunday, April 30, 2006 , and explored the topic of women in mathematics. See Dr. Sarah Greenwald's SimpsonsMath website at Appalachian State University for more details including a link to an interview with one of the writers for this episode.

In 1998 Melanie Wood became the first high school girl ever to win a spot on the United States Mathematical Olympiad Team. While a student at Duke University, Melanie was the first American woman, and second woman overall, to win the Putnam competition—a prestigious math competition for college students. Read her interview in Math Horizons, September 2004 , or the 2003 Duke University article about her accomplishments in math