There is a long history of women in mathematics in the United States. All women mentioned here are American unless otherwise noted.
Timeline
19th Century
20th Century
1970s
1980s
1990s
21st Century
- 2002: Melanie Wood became the first American woman and second woman overall to be named a Putnam Fellow in 2002. Putnam Fellows are the top five (or six, in case of a tie) scorers on William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition.
- 2004:
- Melanie Wood became the first woman to win the Frank and Brennie Morgan Prize for Outstanding Research in Mathematics by an Undergraduate Student. It is an annual award given to an undergraduate student in the US, Canada, or Mexico who demonstrates superior mathematics research.
- Alison Miller became the first female gold medal winner on the U.S. International Mathematical Olympiad Team.
- 2006: Stefanie Petermichl, a German mathematical analyst then at the University of Texas at Austin, became the first woman to win the Salem Prize, an annual award given to young mathematicians who have worked in Raphael Salem's field of interest, chiefly topics in analysis related to Fourier series. She shared the prize with Artur Avila.
- 2019:
- Karen Uhlenbeck became the first woman to win the Abel Prize, with the award committee citing "the fundamental impact of her work on analysis, geometry and mathematical physics."
- Marissa Kawehi Loving became the first Native Hawaiian woman to earn a PhD in mathematics when she graduated from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2019. In addition to being Native Hawaiian, she is also black, Japanese, and Puerto Rican.
- 2020:
- Lisa Piccirillo published a mathematical proof in the journal Annals of Mathematics determining that the Conway knot is not a smoothly slice knot, answering an unsolved problem in knot theory first proposed over fifty years prior by English mathematician John Horton Conway.
See also
Timeline of women in mathematics
References
Further reading