Grace Chisholm Young

Grace Chisholm Young (née Chisholm, 15 March 1868 – 29 March 1944) was an English mathematician. She was educated at Girton College, Cambridge, England and continued her studies at Göttingen University in Germany, where in 1895 she received a doctorate. Her early writings were published under the name of her husband, William Henry Young, and they collaborated on mathematical work throughout their lives. She was awarded the Gamble Prize for Mathematics by Girton College in 1915 for her work on calculus.

Early life Grace Chisholm was born on 15 March 1868 She was the youngest of four children. One of her brothers was the journalist and the editor of Encyclopaedia Britannica, Hugh Chisholm. Her father was a senior civil servant, with the title Warden of the Standards in charge of the Weights and Measures Department. Shortly before her father's retirement in 1877, the family settled in Haslemere. Up until the age of 10, Chisholm's was taught by her mother at home. From the age of 10, a governess was engaged for her. She passed the Cambridge Senior Examination in December 1885. Her family encouraged her to pursue social work amongst the poor in London. Chisholm wished to pursue further education; although she wanted to study medicine, her mother would not permit this, so, supported by her father, she decided to study mathematics.

Research After returning to England in 1896, she resumed research she had initiated at Gӧttingen into an equation to determine the orbit of a comet. Her husband continued his work coaching in mathematics. In total, they published 214 papers and four books. They had a total of six children over a nine-year period.

In addition to her career as a pioneering woman in what was then a discipline with significant barriers to entry, she completed all the requirements for a medical degree except the internship. She also learned six languages and taught each of her children a musical instrument. In addition, she published two books for children (Bimbo: A Little Real Story for Jill and Molly (1905) and Bimbo and the Frogs: Another Real Story (1907) — Bimbo was the nickname the Youngs gave their son Frank). The former book aimed to explain to children where babies came from while the latter was about cells. In 1929, she began writing a historical novel, The Crown of England, set in the sixteenth century; she worked on this for five years, but it was never published.