Joanna Isabel Mayer

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Joanna Isabel Mayer (born March 6, 1904 in Pettis County , Missouri , † February 28, 1991 in San Jose , California ) was an American mathematician and university professor. She was the first graduate student in mathematics at Marquette University.

life and work

Mayer was born the third of five children to a parish school teacher and a farmer. She first attended Sacred Heart School in Sedalia, Missouri. In 1917 the family moved to Hollywood , California, where they attended Cathedral High School. After the Spanish flu , the family moved to Phoenix, Arizona , then Los Angeles, from there to San Jose and then to Portland, Oregon for a year . From 1919 to 1920 she was in the first academic class at St. Mary's Academy in Portland. She then moved the family to Seattle , then Spokane, and then Kansas City , Missouri, where she attended Loretto High School for girls. She then moved with the family to Florida, then to Nashville , Tennessee , where she attended St. Bernard's High School and from there to Kansas City, then to Salt Lake City and back to San Jose in the San Francisco Bay Area . According to records at Dominican College in San Rafael, California, she graduated from Notre Dame High School in San Jose before receiving her bachelor's degree from Dominican College of San Rafael in 1927 . From 1927 to 1931 she was enrolled in the Marquette University graduate school . In 1928 she received her Masters degree and in 1930 her membership in the MAA was announced. From 1929 to 1930 she was a department head at Marymount College in Salina. In 1931 she did her doctorate with Harvey Pierson Pettit with the dissertation: Projective Description of Plane Quartic Curves. She was the first graduate student in mathematics at Marquette University. In 1932 she taught in San Jose, California and from 1937 to 1938 she was an instructor at Seton Hill College (now Seton Hill University ), a Catholic women's school in Greensburg, Pennsylvania . In 1939 she taught at Xavier University . During World War II she worked in Washington, DC , and in 1950 for the Guided Missiles Committee of the Department of Defense, Pentagon , Washington, DC She worked for thirteen years at the St. Louis , Missouri Military Personnel File Center. She was a devout Roman Catholic woman, attended and taught only in Catholic schools.

Memberships

Publications (selection)

  • 1932: Projective description of plane quartic curves. In: Tohoku Math. J. Volume 36, pp. 1-21

literature

  • Judy Green, Jeanne LaDuke: Pioneering Women in American Mathematics: The Pre-1940 PhD’s . 2009, ISBN 978-0-8218-4376-5 .

Web links