Elizabeth Magie was an American inventor and educator who invented the board game “The Landlord’s Game,” which was published in 1905 and was a precursor to Monopoly.
Women Mathematicians
Josephine Guidy Wandja
Joséphine Guidy Wandja is an Ivorian mathematician. She is known for her work for being the first African woman to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics.
Maria Wincklelmann Kirch
Maria Winckelmann was a gifted German astronomer and the first woman to discover a comet. Even though her husband originally took credit for the discovery, he later admitted that she was the actual discoverer of the comet.
Hypatia
Hypatia was born in Alexandria, Egypt circa 350–370, and died in 415 AD. She was known for her work in philosophy, mathematics, and astronomy and she is the first female mathematician whose life was well-documented.
Rozsa Peter
Rózsa was born Rózsa Politzer in Budapest, Hungary on February 17, 1905, and died on February 16, 1977. She later changed her name to Péter. She is considered one of the founders of the recursive function theory of mathematics.
Katherine Johnson
Katherine Johnson is a mathematician who contributed to NASA in the early 1960s. She is best known for her work on the Mercury and Apollo programs, calculating the trajectories for manned spaceflights.
Mary Jackson
Mary Jackson was the first African-American woman to work as an engineer at NASA. She was also a brilliant mathematician who helped design the Saturn V rocket that launched Apollo 11 into space.
Mary Cartwright
Dame Mary Cartwright was a brilliant English Mathematician who was a pioneer of the field of mathematics now known as Chaos Theory.
Maryam Mirzakhani
Maryam Mirzakhani is the only woman, and the only Iranian, to receive the Fields Medal for Mathematics for outstanding contributions to research on Riemann surfaces.
Irène Joliot-Curie
A French chemist and physicist who had a major impact on the field of chemistry, Marie was awarded (jointly with her husband) the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1935.
Grace Hopper
Grace Hopper is a computer scientist, mathematician, and a Rear Admiral in the United States Navy. She was born on December 9th, 1906 in New York City.
Florence Nightingale
Florence was recognized as Mother of Modern Nursing and was the first female member of the Royal Statistical Society.
Annie Maunder
Annie was the first woman to be elected as a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Annie Easley
Annie was a computer scientist, rocket scientist, and mathematician who contributed to the science of space exploration.
Julia Robinson
Julia Robinson was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1919 and died in Oakland, California in 1985. Her area of exploration in mathematics was decision problems.
Ada Lovelace
Ada Lovelace was a mathematician and computer scientist, who is credited with writing the first computer algorithm.
Émilie du Châtelet
Émilie du Châtelet was an 18th Century French Mathematician and Natural Philosopher who contributed to our understanding of the Newtonian Laws of Physics.
Agnes Meyer Driscoll
Also known as “Madame X'”, Agnes was one of the top American Naval cryptanalysts during both World War I and World War II
Wang Zhenyi
Wang Zhenyi was a mathematician and scientist from the Qing Dynasty, who broke the customs of the era by becoming educated in math, medicine, and astronomy.
Isabel Maddison
Isabel Maddison is best known for her work in differential equations which she was inspired to study, while at Cambridge.
Theano
Theano of Croton is usually given the title of the first woman mathematician. We don’t know very much about her. However, she is believed to be the wife of Pythagoras…
Dorothy Vaughan
Dorothy Vaughan was the first African-American woman to work as a computer programmer at NASA.
Marie Curie
A scientist who had a major impact on the field of science, Marie was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, and she was the first ‘person’ to win two Nobel Prizes.