Anna Johnson Pell Wheeler

Anna Johnson Pell Wheeler (May 5, 1883 – March 26, 1966) was an American mathematician. She is best known for early work on linear algebra in infinite dimension, which has later become a part of functional analysis.

Anna Johnson was born on 5 May 1883 to Swedish immigrant parents in Hawarden, Iowa in the United States. At the age of nine her family moved to Akron, Iowa and she was enrolled in a private school. In 1903 she graduated from the University of South Dakota and began graduate work at the University of Iowa. Her thesis, titled The extension of Galois theory to linear differential equations, earned her a master's degree in 1904. She obtained a second graduate degree one year later from Radcliffe College, where she took courses from Maxime Bôcher and William Fogg Osgood.

In 1905 she won an Alice Freeman Palmer Fellowship from Wellesley College to spend a year at the University of Göttingen, where she studied under David Hilbert, Felix Klein, Hermann Minkowski, and Karl Schwarzschild. As she worked toward a doctorate, her relationship with Alexander Pell, a former professor from the University of South Dakota, intensified. He traveled to Göttingen and they were married in July 1907. This trip posed a significant threat to Pell's life, since he was a former Russian double agent whose real name was Sergey Degayev.

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