Julia Warren, Helen Abbot, Cornelia Sattler, Ruth Lane, Ruth Mason, Clara Searle, Mabel Clarke
Helen Abbot Merrill (1864 – 1949) was an American mathematician, educator and textbook author[1]
Biography
Merrill was born on March 30, 1864, in Llewellyn Park, New Jersey;[2] her father was a New Jersey insurance claims adjustor of colonial stock. She moved to Massachusetts as a child. She entered Wellesley College in 1882, intending to major in Greek and Latin, but switching to mathematics after one year, and graduated in 1886.[2] In 1893 she began teaching at Wellesley while also studying and guest lecturing abroad. In 1903 she earned a PhD in mathematics at Yale University under the direction of James Pierpont. Her thesis was "On Solutions of Differential Equations which possess an Oscillation Theorem."[3] In 1920 she was appointed vice-president of the Mathematical Association of America. Upon her retirement in 1932 from Wellesley, she was given the title professor emerita.
At Wellesley, Merrill wrote two textbooks with Clara Eliza Smith, Selected Topics in Higher Algebra (Norwood, 1914) and A First Course in Higher Algebra (Macmillan, 1917).[4][5]
She also wrote as a popularizer a book titled Mathematical Excursions in 1933.[6]
Bibliography
C. Henrion "Helen Abbot Merrill" in Women of Mathematics: A Bibliographic Sourcebook L. Grinstein, P. Campbell, ed.s New York: Greenwood Press (1987): 147 - 151
The Mathematics Teacher, 26 (5): 315, May 1933, JSTOR27951594{{citation}}: CS1 maint: untitled periodical (link)
Wells, Mary E. (December 1933), The American Mathematical Monthly, 40 (10): 602–603, doi:10.2307/2301690, JSTOR2301690{{citation}}: CS1 maint: untitled periodical (link)
P. W. L. C. (January 1934), The Marginal Fifty per Cent, Junior-Senior High School Clearing House, 8 (5): 319, JSTOR30174218{{citation}}: CS1 maint: untitled periodical (link)
