Alice Bache Gould

Alice Bache Gould (January 5, 1868 – July 25, 1953) was an American mathematician, philanthropist, and historian, who spent much of her time in Puerto Rico, South America and Spain. She was impelled in that direction by her family's sometime residence in Argentina during her childhood, where her father held a responsible position as an astronomer.

Sent home for her education, Bache Gould trained as a mathematician and undertook graduate studies in mathematics, teaching for a time at Carleton College, Minnesota. Enrolled at MIT, she failed to complete her thesis and obtain the PhD, due to poor health. Finding work as a mathematician subsequently proved difficult.

Early life and education Alice Bache Gould was born on January 5, 1868, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Benjamin Apthorp Gould (1824-1896) and Mary Apthorp Quincy Gould (1834-1883). Her mother was part of the Quincy political family and a descendant of Rev. George Phillips who settled Watertown, Massachusetts in 1630. Her father, an astronomer, headed the Argentine National Observatory. Alice lived briefly with her family in Cordoba, Argentina before being sent back to Cambridge in 1871, to live with relatives. were swept away and drowned. Alice and her younger siblings Mary and Benjamin were unable to help. In 1883, Alice Bache Gould suffered a further loss when her mother died. Her father finally returned from Argentina in 1885. She graduated from Bryn Mawr as a member of the school's second graduating class in 1889 with her A.B. in mathematics and physics. She went on to study at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at Newnham College, Cambridge in England from 1890 to 1893. Although Newnham allowed women to attend classes, it did not yet grant them degrees. After teaching briefly at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, she became a graduate student in mathematics at the University of Chicago in 1894, studying with E. H. Moore. However, her father's death in 1896, the end of her fellowship, and poor health, prevented her from completing her thesis on Brocardian geometry, a type of geometry developed by Henri Brocard.

On November 17, 1897, Alice fulfilled one of her father's ambitions by donating $20,000 to the National Academy of Sciences for the Benjamin Apthorp Gould Fund to support researchers and "advance the science of astronomy". The New York Times identified it at the time as "one of the largest funds in the country".

Puerto Rico In 1901, Gould published a historical monograph on Louis Agassiz in Mark Antony De Wolfe Howe's series of Beacon Biographies of Eminent Americans. She was commended for her descriptions of Agassiz's personality and the Brazilian landscapes.

In 1903 Gould traveled to Puerto Rico, where she spent much of the next seven years. Gould started a "Porto Rico Teachers' Fund" to raise money for a nursing school around 1905. and was approached by Bailey K. Ashford about supporting a Puerto Rican school of tropical medicine. Later in life, between 1941 and 1947, Gould donated approximately 1,500 items on Puerto Rico to the United States Library of Congress.

Spain and the new world During her stay in South America, Gould became interested in the colonization of the Americas, and began to write an article on the early colonization of Barbados. In 1911, she went to Spain, stopping to do research on Christopher Columbus and Queen Isabella I of Castile at the Archivo de Simancas and other Spanish archives. She spent much of the rest of her life there. After the Spanish civil war, Gould again returned to Spain. and was praised particularly for ability to read the penmanship of the court scribes. She is credited with saving documents that would otherwise have been discarded and destroyed.

Samuel Eliot Morison, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Christopher Columbus, Admiral of the Ocean Sea (1942), described Gould as follows: a "distinguished, gray-haired lady, dressed usually in black bombazine with a vintage hat, striding resolutely into the Archive of the Indies to find some document for me that the archivist insisted did not exist." He strongly praised her scholarship, which he considered "the most valuable piece of Columbian research in the present [20th] century."

Awards In 1942, Gould became the only female corresponding member of Real Academia de la Historia. In 1952, she was awarded the Order of Isabella the Catholic, presented in Seville by Joaquin Ruiz Jimenez, the Spanish Minister of Education. Gould died of a cerebral hemorrhage on July 25, 1953, in the garden at Simancas Castle, near the archives. A square in Simancas, Spain was named after her.

Works Gould's papers and collected materials are contained in a number of archives, including the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the Spanish Royal Academy of History.