Martha Helen Barton
American physicist and mathematician (1891-1971)
Martha Helen Barton (1891–1971), also known as Helen Barton, was an American physicist and mathematician. She was one of the few women to earn a doctorate in the United States in mathematics before World War II.
Biography
Martha Helen Barton was born August 9, 1891, in Baltimore, Maryland, the daughter of Mary Irene Eichelberger and James Sheridan Barton. She attended Western High School graduating with honors and then completed her bachelor's degree from nearby Goucher College in 1913, a member of Phi Beta Kappa. By then she was known as Helen Barton. She worked for one year as an assistant in physics at Goucher and the following year, 1914–1915, began graduate studies in mathematics and physics as a Goucher alumnae fellow at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
Educator
For four years beginning in 1915, Barton headed the department of chemistry and physics at Salem College, a private college for women in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. She spent the next two years as a math instructor at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. Returning to her graduate study at Johns Hopkins during the summers of 1920 and 1921, she also pursued graduate work at Harvard University in the winter of 1921 even as she taught at Wellesley. Johns Hopkins awarded her a master's degree in June 1922. Her master's thesis was titled: The fundamental theorem of algebra.
“Martha Helen Barton” enters the record as american physicist and mathematician (1891-1971). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Martha, Helen and Barton can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Martha Helen Barton” 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.