International Women in Mathematics Day
Today, May 12, 2025, we are celebrating the seventh International Women in Mathematics Day. This day serves to highlight and recognize women in a subject that they have played a key role in shaping over the centuries – often without being named or recognized. This is because many important female mathematicians worked under difficult conditions: For a long time, women were denied access to education and a scientific career was not envisaged. Nevertheless, numerous women have asserted themselves, researched, taught and enriched the mathematical world with their findings. One of these women is the Iranian mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani, who was born on May 12, 1977, thus establishing the date of this day. In 2014, she was the first woman ever to receive the Fields Medal – one of the highest honors in mathematics.
To mark this special day, we not only want to commemorate the achievements of some women, but also show how their topics can be experienced in a very concrete, contemporary and admittedly much simplified way in mathematics lessons or in everyday life – with MathCityMap.
Hanna Neumann (1914-1971), for example, conducted research in the field of group theory and combinatorics. Her first publication dealt with selection rules in chess competitions. Under the tag “Combinatorics” you will find numerous tasks on mathematical arrangement and selection. If you would like to work on a task about chess, you can work on the task “Walking on the Chessboard” (3432743).
Sophie Germain (1776-1831) is also one of the pioneers in her field. She worked intensively on Fermat’s last theorem and became famous for the so-called Sophie Germain primes. Despite the social obstacles of her time, she made a significant contribution to number theory. If you would like to explore this topic in a fun way, MathCityMap offers tasks such as “Prime Numbers Street Saint Antoine” (2317764), which deal with prime numbers and offer a simple and practical approach to abstract theory.
Another impressive personality is Katherine Johnson (1918-2020), whose mathematical calculations contributed significantly to the successful implementation of NASA missions during Project Mercury. MathCityMap can be used to tackle real-life physical challenges, for example by calculating speed, as in the task “Speed of the escalator” (835048).
The International Women in Mathematics Day is an invitation to discover. Let’s keep part of the mathematical heritage of these great women alive together – outside, digitally and together with the MathCityMap community.
