Pauline Sperry

Pauline Sperry (March 5, 1885 – September 24, 1967) was an American mathematician.

Born in Peabody, Massachusetts, Sperry was the daughter of a Congregational minister. She earned a BA from Smith College in 1906 at age 21 and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. After teaching at a private school, she returned in 1907 to do graduate work in mathematics and music and earned an MA in the latter in 1908. She continued on at Smith to teach until 1911.

Sperry began studying at the University of Chicago in 1913 and earned an MS in mathematics in 1914. Under the guidance of Ernest Julius Wilczynski, her doctoral thesis, "Properties of a certain projectively defined two-parameter family of curves on a general surface", drew on his work as the founder of the American school of projective differential geometry. She earned her PhD in mathematics and astronomy in 1916 and was elected to the Sigma Xi honor society.

After a year teaching again at Smith, Sperry spent the rest of her academic career at the University of California at Berkeley, beginning in 1917. In 1923, she became the first female assistant professor in the mathematics department at the university. Her students at Berkeley included Raymundo Favila. At the height of McCarthyism, the Board of Regents required university employees to sign a loyalty oath. Sperry, Hans Lewy, and others who refused were barred from teaching without pay in 1950. In the case Tolman v. Underhill, the California Supreme Court ruled in 1952 the loyalty oath unconstitutional and reinstated those who refused to sign. Sperry was reinstated with back pay and the title emeritus associate professor.

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