``Actual accomplishments in this world'': the other students of Charlotte Angas Scott (Q1985471): Difference between revisions

Charlotte Angas Scott (1858--1931) was the first woman in Great Britain who earned a doctorate in mathematics. From 1895 she was Professor and later Head of the Mathematics Department at Bryn Mawr College (Pennsylvania), which was one of the first women's colleges in the US that offered doctoral degrees in mathematics. Scott had eight students who earned doctoral degrees in mathematics with her. This paper, however, is about those three women who started their graduate studies in mathematics at Bryn Mawr in the first decade of the 20th century. Only one of them obtained a doctorate, though not in mathematics but in physics. Helen Schaeffer entered Bryn Mawr as a graduate student of mathematics in 1903. During her studies, she spent a year in Göttingen where she attended lectures also in physics. In 1908, she obtained her doctoral degree in physics at Bryn Mawr with William Bashford Huff, who later became her husband. Helen Schaeffer Huff died in 1913 three weeks after childbirth. Marion Reilly started her graduate studies in mathematics at Bryn Mawr in 1901. She also studied physics and philosophy and was very interested in mathematical logic. Reilly planned to write a doctoral thesis in mathematics but never finished it because she got involved in the college's administration. Reilly assisted Bryn Mawr President M. Carey Thomas and worked as Dean of Bryn Mawr from 1907 on. The third graduate student in mathematics was Eva Maria Smith who in 1908 came to Bryn Mawr from England where she had studied at Newnham College in Cambridge. In 1909 Smith had serious health problems (suspected tuberculosis) and Bryn Mawr decided to send her home to England, where Smith later worked at a girls' high school. The paper describes the Bryn Mawr years of these three women who all were considered by Scott as highly talented mathematicians. It is based on archival material, among others, the letters of M. Carey Thomas and the Mathematics Journal Club notebooks.