Lennie Copeland
American mathematician (1881–1951)
Lennie Phoebe Copeland (1881–1951) was an American mathematician and professor at Wellesley College, and was one of the few women to earn a doctorate in mathematics before World War II.
Biography
Lennie Phoebe Copeland was an only child, born to Emma Stinchfield and Lemuel Copeland in Brewer, Maine, on March 30, 1881. She graduated from Bangor High School and then enrolled at the University of Maine, earning her BS in mathematics in 1904. With her degree in hand, Copeland returned to Bangor High School to teach math until 1910 until she left Maine for Wellesley College in Massachusetts to pursue a master's degree. She received her MA in mathematics in 1911 and immediately went to study at the University of Pennsylvania. There, she received her Sc.D. in 1913 with a dissertation titled, On the Theory of Invariants of n-Lines directed by Oliver Edmunds Glenn. She was immediately asked to join the faculty at Wellesley where she knew many esteemed mathematicians and ended up spending the remainder of her teaching career there. Her research centered on the algebra of invariants.
Educator
At Wellesley, Copeland began as an instructor 1913–1920, and moved to assistant professor 1920–1928, associate professor 1928–1937 and professor from 1937 until she retired in 1946 and was made professor emeritus.
In addition to teaching, she also developed and taught a course in the history of mathematics. As part of her research, she collected rare books, especially those about math recreations, and donated them to the Wellesley Treasure Room in the library.
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This entry incorporates text from “Lennie Copeland” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.