Grace Chisholm Young

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Grace Chisholm Young (born March 15, 1868 in Haslemere near London , † March 29, 1944 in England ) was an English mathematician . She was the first woman to receive a doctorate in mathematics with a regular doctoral examination.

Young was the youngest of four children of Henry William Chisholm, a senior British official (Chief Clerk of the Exchequer), and Anna Louisa Bell. Her older brother Hugh Chisholm was later editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica and co-editor of The Times . She was raised by a governess, took the entrance exams at Cambridge and originally wanted to study medicine, which her parents prevented. In 1889 she switched to studying mathematics at Girton College , Cambridge, where William Henry Young was her tutor and she graduated in 1892 with top marks. Then she went to Göttingen, where women could do a doctorate. In 1895 she received her doctorate from Felix Klein (algebraic group theory studies on spherical trigonometry) and then went back to England to look after her parents. There she met Young again, whose second marriage proposal she accepted. She also encouraged him to pursue a research career in mathematics. The couple had their first child in 1897, went to Italy for a year, where both dealt with geometry, and in 1899 to Göttingen, where they lived until 1908 and dealt with set theory on advice from Klein. Two more sons and three daughters were born in Göttingen. They raised most of their children themselves and wrote mathematics and non-fiction books for children (A first book in geometry 1905 with paper-folding tasks, Bimbo 1906, named after the eldest son, and Bimbo and the Frogs 1907). In 1908 they moved to Geneva, where they continued their mathematical work together. Together they wrote several books and 220 mathematical essays. Her book The theory of sets of points (1906) was praised by Georg Cantor .

From 1914 to 1916 she published under her own name on the basics of analysis and received the Gamble Prize of Girton College (1915) for an essay. Young also continued her medical studies in Göttingen and Geneva, but did not obtain a degree. In 1915 they moved to Lausanne. Her son's death in World War I hit her hard, and she gave up mathematical research in the mid-1920s. During the Second World War, she was separated from her husband as she accompanied two grandchildren to her daughter Janet in England in 1940. Her husband died separated from her in Switzerland in 1942, and she died two years later.

With William Henry Young she had six children, including Rosalind Tanner (called Cecily), who also became a mathematician. The other children were Francis or Frank (* 1897, called Bimbo, he fell as a pilot in 1915), Janet Dorothea Ernestine (* 1901), Helen Marian Kinnear (* 1903), Laurence Chisholm (1905-2000, professor at the University of Wisconsin ) and Patrick Chisholm (* 1908). Her granddaughter Sylvia Young Wiegand (daughter of Laurence Chisholm Young) is also a mathematician.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Grace Chisholm Young in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)Template: MathGenealogyProject / Maintenance / id used
  2. ^ Sylvia Young Wiegand , biography at Agnes Scott College