Anna Johnson Pell Wheeler

Anna Johnson Pell Wheeler ( born May 5, 1883 in Calliope, Iowa, † March 26, 1966 in Bryn Mawr ) was an American mathematician.

Wheeler was the daughter of Swedish immigrants and grew up in Akron, Iowa on. From 1899 she studied at the University of South Dakota, where Alexander Pell was her teacher. In 1903 she received her bachelor's degree in 1904 and received her master's degree at the University of Iowa (The extension of Galois theory to linear differential equations ), where she studied with Maxime Bocher and William Fogg Osgood, and also a master's degree from Radcliffe College in 1905. A year she was a student at the University of Göttingen where she heard David Hilbert, Felix Klein, Hermann Minkowski, Gustav Herglotz and Karl Schwarzschild and where she worked on her dissertation. In between she married her former teacher Alexander Pell, 1907 in Göttingen and lectured at the University of South Dakota, where her husband was dean. He was 25 years older than she was, after a stroke in 1911 and died on education in 1921.

Originally they wanted to do a doctorate in Göttingen, due to a dispute with Hilbert ( Hilbert developed at this time his theory of integral equations and Wheeler had been working independently on the same area ) was from nothing, and she received her doctoral degree in 1909 at Eliakim Hastings Moore at the University of Chicago, with the same work on biorthogonal function systems with applications to integral equations which they had submitted in Göttingen. From 1911 she taught at Mount Holyoke College, and in 1918 at Bryn Mawr College. In 1924 she was head of the mathematics faculty there in place of Charlotte Angas Scott, and in 1925 received a full professorship. She remained there until her retirement in 1948, interrupted by a brief second marriage to Arthur Wheeler, in which she lived in Princeton, where her husband had become a Latin professor at the university. After his death in 1932 she was back in Bryn Mawr, where also in 1933 and in particular Wheelers initiative, the famous mathematician Emmy Noether came, but died two years later.

In 1927, she was the first woman Colloquium Lecturer of the American Mathematical Society ( Theory of quadratic forms in infinitely many variables and applications ). The next woman, who was bestowed this honor was only in 1980 Julia Robinson.

Wheeler was temporarily in the Council of the American Mathematical Society and for 18 years co-editor of the Annals of Mathematics. She was an honorary doctor of the New Jersey College of Women and Mount Holyoke College.