Hedvig Louise Beata Petrén-Overton (August 12, 1880 – January 14, 1977) was a Swedish mathematician, the first woman in Sweden with a doctorate in mathematics.

Early life and education

Louise Petrén was one of twelve children of the vicar of

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. Her father had earned a doctorate in mathematics in 1850, and her great-uncle had been a professor of mathematics at

Lund University , motto = Ad utrumque , mottoeng = Prepared for both , established = , type = Public research university , budget = SEK 9 billion Karl Anders Petrén. With two older sisters doing the housework, she was left free to concentrate on her studies. As a child, ill with

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, she told her family that she would not go to heaven unless she could bring her mathematics books there. She earned an education certificate through private tutoring in 1899, and earned a bachelor's degree at

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in 1910 and defended her doctorate at Lund in 1911, with the dissertation ''Extension de la méthode de Laplace aux équations''.

Contributions

Nail H. Ibragimov writes that Petrén "made a profound contribution to the constructive integration theory of partial differential equations in the direction initiated by Euler and continued by Laplace, Legendre, Imschenetsky, Darboux, Goursat. In her PhD thesis she extended to higher-order equations Laplace’s method of integration of second-order linear hyperbolic equations with two independent variables."

Later life

Petrén married

Ernest Overton Charles Ernest Overton (1865–1933) was a British physiologist and biologist, now regarded as a pioneer of the theory of the cell membrane. In the last years of the 19th century Overton did experimental work, allowing the distinction to be drawn ...

, a professor at Lund, but as a woman could not obtain a position there herself. Instead she became a part-time schoolteacher and

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, and raised a family of four children.

Early life and education

Contributions

Later life

References

Further reading