Teresa Cohen

Teresa Cohen (February 14, 1892 – August 10, 1992) was an American mathematician. She was born in Baltimore, Maryland. She attended the Friends School in Baltimore whose teachers she credited with her interest in mathematics and teaching. She earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics and physics at Goucher College in 1912. She earned her PhD in 1918 at Johns Hopkins University.^[1] Dr. Cohen was invited to join the faculty of The Pennsylvania State University in 1920 and became the first woman to serve on the Mathematics faculty. She advanced to the rank of full professor, one of only a handful of women to have that status at Penn State at that time. Due to University regulations she officially retired in 1961, but she maintained an office in the Department of Mathematics and tutored students for free until 1985 at the age of 94, when an accident forced her to return to her native Baltimore and enter a nursing home. Teresa Cohen died in Baltimore in 1992 at the age of 100. She had been a member of the American Mathematical Society, the Mathematical Association of America, Pi Mu Epsilon, and Sigma Delta Epsilon, the national honor society for women in science. Aside from teaching, mathematics, and her local synagogue, Dr. Cohen's main interest was music. She was an amateur violinist.

The papers she published included four papers on investigations of the plane quartic, and a co-authored paper with William Knight about the convergence and divergence of the p-series

in which they gave proofs that could be understood by persons not familiar with the integral test for convergence of a series.

References