09/02/2018

Hilda Phoebe Hudson (1881-1965): First female voice of the ICM

Hilda Phoebe Hudson was born on June 11, 1881, in Cambridge, England, into a family of mathematicians. Her father, William Henry Hoar Hudson, was a member of St. John's College and a professor of mathematics at King's College London; while her mother, Hoare Hudson, was one of the first students at Newnham College, University of Cambridge.

Since her love for mathematics was innate, in 1900 she won a scholarship to graduate from Newnham College three years later. She spent a year expanding her knowledge at the University of Berlin (Germany) alongside names like Schwarz, Schottky, Edmund Landau and others , returning to Newnham in 1905, first as a lecturer in mathematics and then as a research associate.

An expert in algebraic geometry, particularly in Cremona transformations , she was the first woman invited to lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM). At the 1912 ICM in Cambridge (United Kingdom), she presented the lecture "On Binodes and Nodal Curves".

She spent the 1912-1913 academic year in Bryn Mawr, USA. Upon returning to England, she worked as a lecturer at the West Ham Technical Institute until 1917, when she joined a subdivision of the Air Ministry dedicated to aeronautical engineering research, where she applied pioneering work on mathematical modeling to aircraft design.

In 1919, she was awarded the Medal of the Order of the British Empire, becoming one of the few women to serve on the council of the London Mathematical Society. With the end of the First World War, Hilda was appointed technical assistant to Parnell and Company in Bristol. After two years, she retired from this position to dedicate herself to writing the treatise on Cremona transformations in the plane and in space, a book that was published in 1927. She died on November 26, 1965, at the age of 84.