Mina Rees

Mina Spiegel Rees (August 2, 1902, Cleveland, Ohio – October 25, 1997, New York City) was an American mathematician. She was the first female President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1971) and head of the mathematics department of the Office of Naval Research of the United States. Rees was a pioneer in the history of computing and helped establish funding streams and institutional infrastructure for research. Rees was also the founding president and president emerita of the Graduate School and University Center at CUNY. She received the Public Welfare Medal, the highest honor of the National Academy of Sciences; the King's Medal for Service in the Cause of Freedom (UK) and at least 18 honorary doctorates.

Rees was the daughter of Moses and Alice Louise (née Stackhouse) Rees. The family moved from Cleveland, Ohio to New York where Rees received her primary education in the city's public schools. In 1955, Rees married physician Leopold Brahdy. She died in 1997 at the Mary Manning Walsh home in Manhattan.

She was valedictorian at Hunter College High School in New York City. She graduated Summa cum Laude with a math major at Hunter College in 1923. She received a masters in mathematics from Columbia University in 1925, where she also studied law. At that time she was told unofficially that "the Columbia mathematics department was not really interested in having women candidates for Ph.D's". She started teaching at Hunter College then took a sabbatical to study for the doctorate at the University of Chicago in 1929. She earned her doctorate in 1931 with a dissertation on abstract algebra titled "Division algebras associated with an equation whose group has four generators," published in the American Journal of Mathematics, Vol 54 (Jan. 1932), 51-65. Her advisor was Leonard Dickson.

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