March 15, is reserved to Grace Chisholm Young

March 15, is reserved to Grace Chisholm Young
Today is the birthday of Grace Chisholm Young, an English mathematician who was the first woman to receive a PhD in Germany. She was born in 1868 near London. In 1889 she was awarded a scholarship to study at Cambridge University’s Girton College, at the time the only school in England that accepted women at the university level. Unable to pursue graduate studies in England, she applied to the University of Göttingen in Germany, one of the major mathematical centers in the world, which had just established a course for women.

Studying under renowned mathematician Felix Klein, she earned her PhD, magna cum laude, in 1895. The following year she married William Henry Young, one of her former tutors at Girton. The couple lived and worked in Europe, where they undertook research on such topics as geometry and set theory. Together, they wrote more than 200 articles and several books. Grace Young is one of the namesakes of the Denjoy-Young-Saks theorem, which describes the derivatives of functions.

Source & further reading:
http://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.5.031435/full/

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