i i Mary Frances Winston Newson By Keira

Mary Frances Winston, the first American woman to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics from a European university, was born in Forreston, Illinois, one of seven children of Thomas Winston, a country doctor, and his wife Caroline. After being taught at home by her mother, Mary left Illinois at the age of 15, along with her brother, to enroll at the University of Wisconsin. Winston graduated from Wisconsin in 1889 with a classical degree with honors in mathematics.

After a brief stint as an instructor in mathematics at Downer College in Fox Lake, Wisconsin, from , Winston received a fellowship in mathematics to study at Bryn Mawr College. She stayed at Bryn Mawr for only one year, then began study at the University of Chicago during

During the summer of 1893 Winston attended the International Mathematical Congress at the World's Columbian Exposition in Evanston, Illinois. There she met Felix Klein, the distinguished professor of mathematics at the University of Gottingen. Klein suggested that she come to Gottingen to study mathematics.

, Fortunately, Winston also met Christine Ladd-Franklin at this same exposition. Ladd-Franklin spent much time, and some of her own money, helping women to pursue the graduate study of mathematics. In this case, she offered Mary Winston $500 for study abroad, an offer that allowed Winston to attend Gottingen.

Winston arrived in Göttingen at the same time as the English mathematician Grace Chisholm (later Young) and Margaret Maltby, a physics major from Ohio. She stayed for three years, working in the area of differential equations. She completed her examination for the Ph.D. degree in July, 1896, with a thesis on "Über den Hermiteschen Fall der Laméschen Differentialgleichungen" (On the Hermite case of the Lamé differential equations). Her thesis advisor was Felix Klein. She had published an earlier paper in the Mathematische Annalen (Vol. 46, 1895) about the theory of hypergeometric functions.

Winston had to return home to find a job, but the Ph.D. degree would not be granted until the thesis had been turned in. She hoped to have it printed in the United States and took the manuscript with her, but this country had no way of printing the mathematical symbols, so it had to go back to Göttingen. As a result Winston did not officially receive her diploma until 1897 when her dissertation was published in Germany.

Winston returned to the United States to teach high school in St. Joseph, Missouri. The next year she became the head (and only member) of the mathematics department at Kansas State Agriculture College in Manhattan, Kansas. Winston was the first woman with a doctorate appointed to the Kansas State faculty. She taught there until giving up the position in 1900 to marry Henry Byron Newson, professor of mathematics at the University of Kansas. They had three children between 1901 and 1909.

Tragically, in 1910, Henry Newson died of a heart attack, leaving his wife with no job and three small children to raise. In 1913, Newson received an offer as an assistant professor of mathematics at Washburn College. She left Washburn in 1921, in part because of one of the first cases of academic freedom investigated by the American Association of University Professors. Newson moved back to Illinois to become professor of mathematics at Eureka College, a position she held until her retirement in She was the chair of the Division of Science and Mathematics from 1935 to She still consulted occasionally with her son, Henry Winston Newson, on the mathematical aspects of his work in nuclear physics.

‘ Mary Winston Newson joined the American Mathematical Society in She was also a charter member of the Mathematical Association of America, served as President of the Kansas Association of Teachers of Mathematics, and was chairperson of the international relations roundtable of the Eureka branch of the American Association of University Women. In 1940 she was honored at the Women's Centennial Congress as one of 100 outstanding women who held positions that were not open to women one hundred years earlier..

credits To Mrs. Bastian To my mom “And to all the great girl mathematicians of the world keep doing your thing” By Keira Doyle.