Distinguished Women in Mathematics Lecture Series

Horton-Jacobs/Women in Natural Science Lecture Series

The Horton-Jacobs/WINS Lecture began in the spring of 2009 and is a yearly talk for general mathematical audiences. It is meant to complement the Distinguished Women in Mathematics Lecture Series and is managed by a committee of women graduate students, postdocs and junior faculty.

This lecture series honors two women mathematicians who were members of the UT Mathematics Department faculty in the 1920's: Goldie Printis Horton and Jessie Marie Jacobs.

Goldie P. Horton was the first student to receive a PhD (1916) in Mathematics at the University of Texas at Austin, and the first woman to receive a PhD in any field at UT. Her thesis concerned some aspects of the relatively new theory of Lebesgue integration and was published in the Annals of Mathematics. In 1917 she joined the faculty at UT as an Instructor in Pure Mathematics, she was appointed Adjunct Professor in 1926, and in 1935 this rank was changed to Assistant Professor.

Jessie M. Jacobs was an algebraist who was recruited to Austin as a Lecturer from the University of Illinois where she received her PhD in 1919. In addition to her teaching duties, she was also an editor for the Texas Mathematics Teachers' Bulletin. She later married the Nobel prize-winning biologist H.J. Muller and they had one son, David Eugene. Her appointment was then terminated by the Mathematics Department on the grounds that one could not both be a "good mother" and a faculty member at UT.

The women who have lectured as part of this series are listed below.
2008 - 2009: Ruth Charney
2009 - 2010: Dusa McDuff
2010 - 2011: Alice Chang
2011 - 2012: Gordana Matic
2012 - 2013: Ingrid Daubechies
2013 - 2014: Amie Wilkinson
2014 - 2015: Alessandra Iozzi
2015 - 2016: Katrin Wehrheim
2016 - 2017: Kavita Ramanan