Sophie Morel

While doing a book review of Change is Possible: Stories of Women and Minorities in Mathematics by Patricia C. Kenschaft (I'll talk about the book itself some other time) I came across this gem: the Harvard mathematics department has never had a tenured female member. The book was written in 2005, so I checked the Harvard website to see if anything had changed. It hadn't. But that was a few months ago.

Hidden away in this article about women at Harvard was this history-making news:

And at Harvard, as at most American research universities, math and science remain male domains. The math department’s first tenured woman, Sophie Morel, arrived just three months ago. The department admitted two female graduate students this year and none last year.

Harvard, the oldest institution of higher learning in the US, was founded 374 years ago.