Mary Winston Newson

Mary Winston Newson (born August 7, 1869 in Foreston , Illinois , † December 5, 1959 in Poolesville , Maryland ) was an American mathematician and university teacher. She was the first American woman to receive a PhD in mathematics from a European university. She produced the first English translation of David Hilbert's lecture in 1900, which presented the first ten of his famous problems , which were published in the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society.

Life and research

Winston Newson was born Mary Frances Winston, the fourth of eight children to a country doctor and teacher. She was homeschooled by her mother, who taught herself Latin and Greek to prepare her children for university education. Her mother had studied geology and took a correspondence course at the Field Museum in Chicago .

In 1884 Mary Winston Newson began studying at the University of Wisconsin – Madison and graduated in 1889 in mathematics with honors. She taught at Downer College, Fox Lake, Wisconsin, from 1890 to 1891, and then studied on a scholarship at Bryn Mawr College , Pennsylvania. She continued her studies at the newly opened University of Chicago in 1892 on a scholarship. In 1893 she met Felix Klein in Chicago , who invited her to study at the Georg-August University in Göttingen . In 1893, with the financial support of Christine Ladd-Franklin , she sailed to Germany on the Westerland with the biologist Ida Henrietta Hyde , who had received the ACA European Fellowship . She came to Göttingen at the same time as Margaret Maltby and Grace Chisholm Young and her first work on hypergeometric functions was published as early as 1894, so the Association of Collegiate Alumnae granted her a scholarship for the next academic year. In 1896 she graduated magna cum laude from Felix Klein with the dissertation: On the Hermitian case of Lamé's differential equation. She returned to the USA with the manuscript of the dissertation, where no publisher could print the mathematical symbols of her work, so she had to send the work back to Göttingen for printing, which is why she did not receive her doctorate magna cum laude until 1897. Grace Chisholm received her PhD in 1895, making her the second woman and first American student to do her PhD in Göttingen. Sofja Wassiljewna Kowalewskaja was able to do her doctorate in absentia (without oral exams) in Göttingen as early as 1874, but was never enrolled as a student. In 1896 she was called to St. Joseph's High School in St. Joseph, Missouri, and from 1897 to 1900 she headed the mathematics department at the Kansas State Agricultural College (now Kansas State University ) in Manhattan, Kansas . In 1900 she married the mathematician Henry Byron Newson (1860-1910) in Chicago , with whom she had three children from 1901 to 1909. Her husband died in 1910. In 1913 she became an assistant professor of mathematics at Washburn University in Topeka and she was temporarily separated from her children. From 1921 until her retirement in 1942, she was a professor of mathematics at Eureka College in Illinois . She then lived on Lake Dalecarlia, Indiana, and moved to a nursing home in Poolesville, Maryland in 1956. She died the day after the death of her brother Ambrose Paré Winston, who had been a professor of economics.

In 1896, Mary Winston Newson joined the American Mathematical Society. She was a founding member of the Mathematical Association of America, President of the Kansas Association of Teachers of Mathematics, and Chair of the International Relations Round Table of the Eureka Branch of the American Association of University Women. In 1940, at the Women's Centennial Congress, she was honored as one of 100 outstanding women holding positions that were not open to women 100 years earlier.

Memberships

• American Mathematical Society
• Mathematical Association of America
• American Association of University Women
• Phi Beta Kappa

Publications (selection)

• 1895 Winston, M .: A remark on the theory of hypergeometric function. Math. Ann. 46.
• 1920: The bridge between high school and college mathematics. Amer. Math. Monthly 27.
• 1926: What constitutes a good teacher of mathematics? Amer. Math. Monthly 33.
• 1928: The ideals of the teacher of mathematics. Amer. Math. Monthly 35.

literature

• Whitman, Betsey: "Mary Frances Winston Newson," in Women of Mathematics: A Biobibliographic Sourcebook, Louise Grinstein and Paul Campbell, Editors, Greenwood Press, 1987.
• Whitman, Betsey: "Mary Frances Winston Newson: The First American Woman to Receive a Ph.D. in Mathematics from a European University," Mathematics Teacher, Nov 1983, 576-577.
• Whitman, Betsey: "An American Woman in Gottingen," The Mathematical Intelligencer, Vol. 15, no. 1: 60-62 (1993).
• Whitman, Betsey: A Woman Ahead of Her Time: Mary Frances Winston Newson, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2016.
• Helen Brewster Owens Papers. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College.
• Mary Frances Winston Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College
• Obituary. Washington Post, December 1, 1959.

Web links

Commons : Mary Frances Winston Newson  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

• Mary Winston Newson in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)
• Biography at AMS
• Biography with Agnes Scott
• Biography at Maths History