The role of minority and women mathematicians in developing our American mathematical community is an important but previously under-told story.

Julia is the story of Julia Bowman Robinson, the gifted and highly original mathematician who during her lifetime was recognized in ways that no other woman mathematician had ever been recognized.

This volume features substantive biographical essays on 59 women from around the world who have made significant contributions to mathematics from antiquity to the present.

More than 14 percent of the PhD's awarded in the United States during the first four decades of the twentieth century went to women, a proportion not achieved again until the 1980s.

In early 1945, the United States military was recruiting female mathematicians for a top-secret project to help win World War II. Betty Jean Jennings (Bartik), a twenty-year-old college graduate from rural northwest Missouri, wanted an adventure, so she applied for the job. She was hired as a computer, a human to calculate artillery shell trajectories for Aberdeen Proving Ground Later, she joined a team of women who programmed the Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer (ENIAC).

In the 1940s and 50s, when the newly minted Jet Propulsion Laboratory needed quick-thinking mathematicians to calculate velocities and plot trajectories, they didn't turn to male graduates. Rather, they recruited an elite group of young women who, with only pencil, paper, and mathematical prowess, transformed rocket design, helped bring about the first American satellites, and made the exploration of the solar system possible.

Women mathematicians of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s and how they built professional identities in the face of social and institutional obstacles.