Muriel Kennett Wales

Muriel Kennett Wales (9 Jun 1913 – 8 August 2009) was an Irish-Canadian mathematician, and is believed to have been the first Irish-born woman to earn a PhD in pure mathematics.[1][2]

Life

She was born Muriel Kennett on 9 June 1913 in Belfast. In 1914, her mother moved to Vancouver and soon remarried; henceforth Muriel was known by her mother's new last name, Wales.[3]

She was first educated at the University of British Columbia (BA 1934, MA 1937 with the thesis Determination of Bases for Certain Quartic Number Fields).[4] In 1941 she was awarded the PhD from the University of Toronto for the dissertation Theory Of Algebraic Functions Based On The Use Of Cycles under Samuel Beatty[5] (himself the first person to receive a PhD in mathematics in Canada, in 1915).[6]

She spent most of the 1940s working in atomic energy, in Toronto and Montreal, but by 1949 had retired back to Vancouver where she worked in her step-father's shipping company.[3]

References

  1. ↑ The First Irish Woman with a Doctorate in Maths Mathematics Ireland
  2. ↑ The first woman born and brought up in Ireland to get a PhD in mathematical science–as opposed to pure mathematics–was Sheila Tinney, in 1941.
  3. 1 2 O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Muriel Kennett Wales", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews .
  4. ↑ Determination of Bases for Certain Quartic Number Fields, University of British Columbia (1937)
  5. ↑ Theory Of Algebraic Functions Based On The Use Of Cycles, Pamphlet, Trans Royal Society of Canada (1944), ASIN: B00KJ0XT04
  6. ↑ Samuel Beatty MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews.
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