Skip to footer

STEM Heroines: Math role models for girls

Here's our list of female mathematicians through history who broke down barriers in their own lives to learn and live as experts in their field.  

2. Charlotte Angas Scott (1848 – 1931)

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
Farheen Syed looks over her talk before she speaks at an event organized by the Muslim MakeSpace group called Ideas to Transform our Condition. Ms. Syed is an undergraduate in computer science and spoke about algorithms and how math underpins human behavior patterns. The event took place in Washington, D.C., on December 7, 2013.

  • By Staff Correspondent

Charlotte Angas Scott was an English-American mathematician and educator. Thanks to the encouragement of her father, a congregational church minister, and the tutelage of her mother, Ms. Scott, who was home educated, became the first head of the math department at Bryn Mawr College, which was founded outside of Philadelphia in 1885.

With only her home-schooling credentials, in 1876 she was awarded a scholarship to Girton College, the first residential college in England exclusively for women. The campus was close to Cambridge University, which allowed students to attend lectures at there. At that time, only 22 professors out of 34 total at Cambridge University were willing to let women attend.

Since male students at Cambridge were subjected to standardized tests – called Tripos – in order to graduate with bachelor's degrees with honors, many female students from Girton insisted on taking the exams as well. Scott was given special permission to take the mathematics Tripos in 1880, and news quickly spread when her scores placed her alongside the top male Cambridge graduates that year.

Her work to create standardized testing for college entrance resulted in the formation of the College Entrance Examination Board, which created the SAT.

2 of 10
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.