Elizabeth Buchanan Cowley

Elizabeth Buchanan Cowley (1874–1945) was an American mathematician.

Life Cowley was born on May 22, 1874, in Allegheny, Pennsylvania. She had four siblings, but they and her father all died by 1900.

Cowley earned a bachelor's degree in 1893 from the Indiana State Normal School of Pennsylvania, and became a school teacher. She earned a second bachelor's degree in 1901 and a master's degree in 1902 from Vassar College, and became an instructor at Vassar, studying higher mathematics during the summers at the University of Chicago. Continuing to work at Vassar, Cowley was promoted to assistant professor in 1913, and associate professor in 1916. She went on leave in 1926 to assist her mother, and resigned her position at Vassar in 1929, instead becoming a high school teacher in Pittsburgh.

Contributions Cowley and her co-author Ida Whiteside won a prize for a 1907 paper they wrote on the orbit of comet C/1825 V1. Another of her publications, in 1926, concerned liquid water pouring puzzles. She was the author of two textbooks on plane and solid geometry, published in 1932 and 1934, and advocated teaching solid geometry to high school students after many colleges had replaced the subject with freshman calculus. She also belonged to the American Mathematical Society, German Mathematical Society, and Circolo Matematico di Palermo.