Mary Frances Winston Newson

Mary Frances Winston Newson (August 7, 1869 – December 5, 1959) was an American mathematician. She became the first female American to receive a PhD in mathematics from a European university, namely the University of Göttingen in Germany.

Mary Newson was born Mary Frances Winston in Forreston, Illinois, the name Newson being the name of the husband she married. She was always known as May by her friends and family. Her parents were Thomas Winston, a country doctor, and Caroline Eliza Mumford. Thomas Winston had been born in Wales but had come to the United States at the age of two years when his parents emigrated. Caroline had been a teacher before her marriage, teaching French, art and mathematics. Mary was one of her parents' seven surviving children. She was taught at home by her mother, who taught herself Latin and Greek so that she could prepare her children for a university education. Her mother had also studied geology, taking a correspondence course with the Field Museum in Chicago.

She and her older brother enrolled at the University of Wisconsin in 1884, when she was 15. She graduated with honors in mathematics in 1889. After teaching at Downer College in Fox Lake, Wisconsin, she applied for a fellowship at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania in 1890. Charlotte Scott was the professor of mathematics at Bryn Mawr and she encouraged Winston to apply again for the fellowship in the following year having narrowly failed to gain the fellowship at her first attempt. Winston taught for a second year at Downer College and she was awarded the fellowship the next year but chose to continue her studies at the University of Chicago which was opening on 1 October 1892, spending the year 1891-92 at Bryn Mawr College. Winston was awarded a fellowship to study at Chicago and she spent the year 1892-93 there.

At the International Mathematical Congress held at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, she met Felix Klein, who urged her to study at the University of Göttingen. With financial assistance from Christine Ladd-Franklin, she arrived in Germany at the same time as two other American students, Margaret Maltby and Grace Chisholm. Her first paper, on the topic of hypergeometric functions, was published in 1894. The Association of Collegiate Alumnae gave Winston a fellowship to fund her during the academic year 1895-96.. She graduated magna cum laude and was awarded her PhD upon the publication of her dissertation, "Über den Hermite'schen Fall der Lamé'schen Differentialgleichungen" (On the Hermite case of the Lamé differential equations), in the summer of 1896 and was examined in July 1896. She had to have the thesis published before she could be awarded a doctorate and she returned to the United States with the manuscript of the work intending to publish it there. However, no publisher in the United States was able to print the mathematical symbols in her thesis so she had to return it to Göttingen. It was published in 1897 and she received the doctorate magna cum laude in that year. Grace Chisholm had been awarded a doctorate in 1895, so Winston became the second woman, and the first American, student to be awarded a doctorate by Göttingen, as Sofia Kovalevskaya was awarded a doctorate by Göttingen in 1874 but she was never allowed to enrol as a student. She published only one further article, the first English translation of the 1900 lecture by David Hilbert presenting the first ten of his famous problems, issued in the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society.

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