skip to content

Women in Mathematics

 
1 / 9

  • Professor of Applied Mathematics, University College London
  • Head of the Department of Mathematics, University College London since 2018
  • Vice-President of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications since 2019
  • President of the British Society of Rheology 2015-17
Helen Wilson [Fluid Dynamics]
2 / 9
  • Professor of Mathematcs, Bryn Mawr College 1888-1917
  • Co-Editor of the American Journal of Mathematics 1899-1926
  • Vice-President of the American Mathematical Society 1905
  • First British woman to receive a Doctorate in Mathematics, 1885
  • 'Eighth Wrangler' 1880

Charlotte Angas Scott [Algebraic Geometry]
3 / 9

  • Deputy Vice Chancellor, University of Cambridge
  • Emeritus Professor of Mechanical Engineering
  • Royal Society Royal Medal 2019
  • James Watt International Gold Medal 2016
  • President of the Royal Academy of Engineering 2014-19
  • Head of Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge 2009-14
Ann Dowling, DBE [Fluid Dynamics]
4 / 9

  • Savilian Professor of Geometry, University of Oxford
  • Senior Whitehead Prize 2013
  • President of the London Mathematical Society 2004-06
  • Fellow of the Royal Society 2001
  • Whitehead Prize 1989
Frances Kirwan, DBE FRS [Algebraic and Symplectic Geometry]
5 / 9

  • Emeritus Professor of Mathematics, King's College London
  • Royal Society Kavli Education Medal 2018
  • Deputy Chair of the Advisory Committee on Mathematical Education 2009-11
  • Head of Department of Mathematics, King's College London 2001-04
Alice Rogers, OBE [Geometry and Analysis on Supermanifolds]
6 / 9

  • Professor of Pure Mathematics, The Open University
  • Suffrage Science Award 2016
  • Whitehead Prize 2000
Gwyneth Stallard, OBE [Complex Dynamics and Iteration of Meromorphic Functions]
7 / 9

  • Professor of Applied Mathematics, University of Oxford
  • Associate Head of Department, Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford
  • Fellow of the Society for Mathematical Biology 2021
  • Leah Edelstein-Keshet Prize 2019
Helen Byrne [Mathematical Biology]
8 / 9

  • Professor of Theoretical Physics, King's College London
  • Head of Department of Physics, King's College London since 2021
  • Royal Society Wolfson Merit Research Award 2011
  • Maxwell Medal and Prize 2006
Ruth Gregory [General Relativity and Cosmology]
9 / 9

  • Principal Assistant to the Director of Education, then Assistant Education Officer for Higher Education, London County Council 1905-1934
  • College Lecturer, Norman School Teacher Training College, Johannesburg 1902-05
  • College Lecturer in Mathematics, Newnham College, University of Cambridge 1892-1902
  • ‘Above the Senior Wrangler’ 1890
Philippa Fawcett [Fluid Dynamics, Mathematics Education]

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

We celebrated International Women's Day with the slideshow above of a small sample of female mathematicians who studied Mathematics in Cambridge.

Check out the videos below to hear from more women in Maths from Cambridge and elsewhere.
 

Welcome to the webpages for all female Mathematicians studying or working in Cambridge.

Whether you’re inspired by pure or applied maths, theoretical physics, or statistics, you will find here other women who share your interests.

The Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge Sciences is a supporter of the Good Practice Scheme co-ordinated by the London Mathematical Society, and holds an Athena SWAN Bronze Award. We are keen to attract the best talent from all backgrounds and genders, and therefore strongly encourage women to apply to join us, whether as students or staff

Professor Anne Davis, Professor of Mathematical Physics and former chair of the Faculty Athena SWAN committee,  is pictured right, holding the Faculty Athena SWAN award, with the Heads of Department in 2014, Professor Peter Haynes and Professor Gabriel Paternain.

 

"Journeys of Women in Mathematics” is a film created by the International Mathematical Union (IMU) Committee for Women in Mathematics. It was filmed and edited by Micro-Documentaries, with a grant by the Simons Foundation. It profiles women mathematicians from around the world. In the first part of the film Neela Nataraj from India, Aminatou Pecha from Cameroon and Carolina Araujo from Brazil, are featured at their home institutions in their respective countries. The second part of the film was shot at (WM)2: World Meeting for Women in Mathematics, a satellite event of the ICM 2018. It contains short interviews of six women from various Latin American countries.

 

Announcements

Athena SWAN Bronze Award LMS Good Practice Scheme logo
May 2021
  • On 12 May, the Emmy Noether Society is hosting a talk by Dr Eugenia Cheng: Inclusion - Exclusion in Mathematics and Beyond, as part of the may12 initiative, which brings together events from all over the world celebrating women in mathematics. 12th May was the birthday of Maryam Mirzakhani; it was chosen by the World Meeting for Women in Mathematics, at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2018, to celebrate women in mathematics in her memory.
  • On 27 May, Julia Gog will give a lecture on Maths vs. Covid-19. In this joint event between the London Mathematical Society and Gresham College. Julia will explain some of the maths used in the fight against the pandemic, and also give some insights into life as a mathematician assisting with policy advice during this unprecedented time.
March 2021
December 2020
  • Stephanie Höhn has been announced as one of the awardees of the first round of CPB Pump Priming Grants, aimed at generating new collaborations between early career research teams, and promoting multidisciplinary research in the field of physical biology.
November 2020
  • Mihaela van der Schaar is named Director of the new Cambridge Centre for AI in Medicine (CCAIM), a research collaboration between the University of Cambridge, AstraZeneca and GSK. The CCAIM brings together an interdisciplinary team from across the University, to study applications of machine learning to problems in biomedical science and healthcare delivery. It will support 5 new PhD studentship for the next five years.
October 2020
  • Julia Gog has been made an OBE for services to academia and the COVID-19 response.
September 2020
August 2020
  • Julia Gog has been awarded the Royal Society’s Rosalind Franklin Award in recognition of her achievements in the field of mathematics and her impactful project proposal with its potential for a long-term legacy.
June 2020
  • Holly Krieger has been awarded a Whitehead Prize for her deep contributions to arithmetic dynamics, to equidistribution, to bifurcation loci in families of rational maps, and her proof (with DeMarco and Ye) of uniform boundedness results for numbers of torsion points on families of bielliptic genus two curves in their Jacobians.
  • Maria Bruna has been awarded a Whitehead Prize in recognition of her outstanding research in asymptotic homogenisation, most prominently in the systematic development of continuum models of interacting particles systems.
January 2020
  • Helen Mason OBE, joined Melvyn Bragg and guests on BBC Radio 4 ‘In our Time’ to discuss `Solar Winds', the phenomenon behind the auroras at Earth’s poles, the stream of charged particles spreading out from the Sun to the border of the solar system. Listen now by clicking on Solar Winds.
 

Archive

Athena Swan Bronze Award

The Faculty received a Bronze Athena SWAN Department Award in April 2014 and successfully renewed it in 2017.  We are aiming for a Silver Award, and we are currently implementing a wide-ranging Action Plan to ensure equal opportunities for advancing women's careers in mathematics. The aim of this process is to implement good practice that benefits all, men and women, equally. The Athena Swan Bronze Award is recognition that the Faculty as a whole has a solid foundation of policies and practices to eliminate gender bias and an inclusive culture that values female staff.

Dr Orsola Rath Spivack is the Athena SWAN Coordinator and is working with the Faculty Athena SWAN panel on the implementation of our action plan.

 

Women's Advisers

The Faculty has two Women's Advisers - academics who are available to help female students and academic staff with any issues they may have

 

Videos of more women in Maths from Cambridge and elsewhere.

Lisa Sauermann, four gold IMO Medals, single highest (and perfect) score in 2011, is interviewed by Parth Shimpi, one of our Maths Ambassadors, and IMO volunteer. She now has a PhD from Stanford University, and will be Assistant Professor at MIT starting in summer 2021.
Meet Ingrid Daubechies, one of the world's most cited mathematicians and first woman President of the International Mathematical Union, best known for her pioneering work on wavelets.

Meet Karen Uhlenbeck, a founder of Modern Geometric Analysis and winner of the Abel Prize 2019 for "her pioneering achievements in geometric partial differential equations, gauge theory, and integrable systems, and for the fundamental impact of her work on analysis, geometry and mathematical physics." The Abel Prize Committee will announce on 17 March the new Abel Prize winner 2021.
Julia Gog Podcast
Julia Gog is Professor of Mathematical Biology in DAMTP, served on SAGE advising the government on its response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and is a founding member of the Joint UNIversities Pandemic and Epidemiological Research (JUNIPER) consortium. Listen to this podcast, where she explains what's it like to be on the mathematical frontline.

 

Related links

MSRI talk