Charlotte Angas Scott

English-born American mathematician

• Born: June 8, 1858
• Birthplace: Lincoln, England
• Died: November 10, 1931
• Place of death: Cambridge, England

As the first professor of mathematics at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, Scott created an environment that encouraged a large number of women to work for higher degrees in mathematics. Her research and stature in the field of mathematics blazed a trail that was not matched by other women for many years.

Early Life

Charlotte Angas Scott was born in England, the second of seven children of Caleb and Eliza Ann Exley Scott. Her father was a pastor at a nonconformist (non-Anglican Protestant) church; when Charlotte was seven years old, he was elevated to the headship of Lancashire College. Charlotte was educated primarily at home, and her family could afford to provide her with a sequence of excellent tutors. In addition, the family often played mathematical games with her to provide an additional level of encouragement.

Charlotte’s mathematical talents were sufficiently evident that she received a scholarship at Girton College, one of the newly created women’s colleges at Cambridge University. At that time, women were not allowed to receive degrees from either Cambridge or Oxford University, the two most prestigious institutions of higher education in England. However, that limitation had not prevented the creation of women’s colleges, in which female students could study, even if they could not receive degrees. The idea of offering higher education to women was then largely a subject of mockery. An example of public attitudes can be seen in W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan’s musical play Princess Ida (1884). It took great resolution for women students to put up with antifeminist attitudes in education, but Charlotte Scott was a model of resolution.

Scott received her first—and largest—dose of public attention when she took the Tripos examination at Cambridge. This test took its name from a three-legged stool on which students had originally sat, but it had evolved into the most challenging mathematical exam in England. It was taken by students working for undergraduate degrees in mathematics—a highly select group. Women were allowed to take the exam, but their results were not reported along with those of the male students. When Scott took the exam, she earned a high score equivalent to “eighth wrangler,” but her name was omitted from the list of the results, according to university policy.

The Times of London, the most influential newspaper in Great Britain, took up Scott’s case and transformed the question of reporting women’s exam results into a national issue. The humorous weekly Punch pleaded her case, even though it was not known for holding progressive views. A campaign among the alumni of Cambridge University encouraged the university to change its policy by including women’s exam results along with those of men. This change took place the year after Scott’s success and was one of the first steps in the direction of allowing women to take degrees from the senior universities in England.

Life’s Work

After her years as a student at Girton, Scott stayed on at Cambridge as a lecturer at the same college. Since the University of London did not have the same prohibition on women taking degrees that prevailed at Oxford and Cambridge, Scott earned an undergraduate degree there in 1882 and a doctorate in 1885, following in the footsteps of the relatively small number of women who had received advanced degrees in mathematics elsewhere in Europe. Her work was in the area of algebraic geometry, a subject that was at the forefront of mathematical research at the time. While she was at Cambridge, she had the chance to work with Arthur Cayley, one of the outstanding mathematicians in Europe and a founder of both modern algebra and its application to geometry.

The idea behind algebraic geometry is to use algebraic arguments to prove results about geometric objects. This process involves finding algebraic methods of describing curves and surfaces—which was usually done with equations. If one could work with the equations, one could apply the techniques of algebra rather than having to fall back on the principles of geometry, which sometimes were difficult to make precise. Many different types of geometry were being introduced into academic curricula during the late nineteenth century, and each came with a different range of algebraic techniques. Scott herself became especially well known for her applications of algebra to projective geometry, the branch in which curves are treated as identical when one can be projected onto the other.

During the year 1885, Bryn Mawr College opened in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, to provide education of the highest quality, including graduate study, to women. The new college hired Scott to head its mathematics department, in part because she was one of the few women in the world with a doctorate in the subject. It is a tribute to her teaching skills that Bryn Mawr rapidly became a center for women pursuing doctorates in mathematics. During her tenure there, Bryn Mawr trailed only the University of Chicago and Cornell University in numbers of doctoral degrees in mathematics awarded to women. During that same period, of all U.S. doctorates awarded in mathematics, 14 percent went to women. By comparison, during the 1950’s, only 5 percent of doctorates in mathematics went to women. Only in later years have the percentages of doctorates awarded to women exceeded the levels achieved by Scott at Bryn Mawr.

While she was teaching and supervising students at Bryn Mawr, Scott continued to do research. In 1894, she published a textbook with the ponderous title An Introductory Account of Certain Modern Ideas and Methods in Plane Analytical Geometry and later saw another edition through the press. The book was well received, and her gift for exposition was described as lucid.

During Scott’s years at Bryn Mawr, she made annual pilgrimages back to England to be in a more active mathematical environment. However, she also promoted the professionalization of mathematics in the United States and was active in the newly formed New York Mathematical Society, the ancestor of the American Mathematical Society. She served on the council of the society on many occasions and served as its vice president in 1906. She was the first woman to hold that position, and she did not have a female successor for many decades. In recognition of her status, the first edition of American Men of Science (1906) included an entry for her.

Scott’s views on education did not always make her life easy at Bryn Mawr. She disliked student behavior that she regarded as immoral, such as smoking and wearing makeup. On one occasion she took the president of the college to task for diluting the quality of women’s education. However, she also made signal contributions to campus life, such as bringing the distinguished British mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell there to speak. Her teaching helped to put Bryn Mawr on the intellectual map in both England and the United States.

Scott taught at Bryn Mawr for forty years. By her last years there, ill health was interfering with her teaching as she became deaf and suffered from arthritis. When she retired to Cambridge, England, in 1925, she took up gardening and also spent some of her time and money betting on horse racing. On November 10, 1931, she died at her Cambridge home, at the age of seventy-three.

Significance

Charlotte Scott achieved her greatest prominence in the world at large while she was still a student. Her success on the Tripos exam indicated that women were at Cambridge for reasons other than to find husbands or make polemical statements. Her subsequent distinction as a mathematician made Cambridge University proud to have been her alma mater, even if it would not grant her a degree.

As a professional mathematician, Scott did not revolutionize the subjects in which she worked, but her solid accomplishments paved the way for women to achieve success in graduate work and beyond. She guaranteed that Bryn Mawr College would provide serious mathematical training for women, even if her insistence on high standards did not always make her an easy colleague. The fact that during the 1930’s, Emmy Noether, the world’s most eminent woman mathematician, left Germany because of the rise of Adolf Hitler and went to Bryn Mawr is a tribute to the mathematical environment that Charlotte Scott had created there.

Bibliography

Farquhar, Diane, and Lynn Mary-Rose. Women Sum It Up. Christchurch, New Zealand: Hazard Press, 1989. Study of female mathematicians that covers aspects of Scott’s family background and personal life, rather than her mathematical career.

Gray, J. J. “Charlotte Angas Scott.” In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, edited by H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2004. Mathematically well-informed summary of Scott’s life against the background of the times.

Green, Judy, and Jeanne Laduke. “Contributors to American Mathematics.” In Women of Science: Righting the Record, edited by G. Kass-Simon and Patricia Farnes. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. Recognizes Scott’s work in encouraging women to higher education in mathematics.

Kenschaft, Patricia Clark. “Charlotte Angas Scott.” In Complexities: Women in Mathematics, edited by Bettye Anne Case and Anne M. Leggett. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005. One of several articles on Scott by Kenschaft; useful for filling in some cultural background.

Macaulay, F. S. “Dr. Charlotte Angas Scott.” Journal of the London Mathematical Society 7 (1932): 230-240. The source on which most subsequent biographers draw, paying full attention to Scott’s mathematical work.