Annie Dale Biddle Andrews (December 13, 1885 – April 14, 1940) was the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in

mathematics Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics ...

from the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

Early life and career

She was born in

Hanford, California Hanford is a city and county seat of Kings County, California, located in the San Joaquin Valley region of the greater Central Valley (California), Central Valley. The population was 53,967 at the 2010 United States Census, 2010 census. History ...

, the youngest daughter (and youngest of seven children) of Samuel Edward Biddle and Achsah Annie Biddle (née McQuidy). She received her B.A. degree from the University of California in 1908. In 1911, she wrote her thesis, ''Constructive theory of the unicursal plane quartic by synthetic methods'', under her maiden name, Annie Dale Biddle; it was published by the university in 1912. Her advisors were

Derrick Norman Lehmer Derrick Norman Lehmer (27 July 1867 – 8 September 1938) was an American mathematician and number theorist. Education He was educated at the University of Nebraska, obtaining a bachelor's degree in 1893 and master's in 1896. Lehmer was awarded ...

and

Mellen Haskell Mellen Woodman Haskell (March 17, 1863 – January 15, 1948) was an American mathematician, specializing in geometry, group theory, and applications of group theory to geometry. Education and career After secondary education at Roxbury Latin Scho ...

. The paper proved to be very useful in its time as it was found that all algebraic surfaces correspond to a universal quartic having no double or triple points with distinct

tangent In geometry, the tangent line (or simply tangent) to a plane curve at a given point is the straight line that "just touches" the curve at that point. Leibniz defined it as the line through a pair of infinitely close points on the curve. More ...

s. She was a math instructor at the

University of Washington The University of Washington (UW, simply Washington, or informally U-Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington. Founded in 1861, Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast; it was established in Seattle a ...

from 1911 to 1912, after which she married Wilhelm Samuel Andrews. She worked as a math instructor at the

University of California The University of California (UC) is a public land-grant research university system in the U.S. state of California. The system is composed of the campuses at Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Merced, Riverside, San Diego, San Francisco, ...

between 1915 and 1932 after being appointed as a teaching fellow there in 1914. She presented a research paper at the meeting of the

Journal of the American Mathematical Society The ''Journal of the American Mathematical Society'' (''JAMS''), is a quarterly peer-reviewed mathematical journal published by the American Mathematical Society. It was established in January 1988. Abstracting and indexing This journal is abstr ...

in March 1933 in

Palo Alto, California Palo Alto (; Spanish language, Spanish for "tall stick") is a charter city in the northwestern corner of Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a Sequoia sempervirens, coastal redwood tree kno ...

, entitled ''"The space quartic of the second kind by synthetic methods"''. The abstract of the paper was published later that year.

Personal life

From 1936 Andrews took an active interest in public affairs and charities, in addition to her mathematical research. She died on April 14, 1940 after two years of illness. She was survived by her husband and two children.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Biddle Andrews, Annie Dale 1885 births 1940 deaths American women mathematicians 20th-century American mathematicians 20th-century women mathematicians 20th-century American women