Alice Turner Schafer (1915–2009) was an American mathematician whose career spanned research in projective differential geometry, decades of college teaching, and a defining role in opening professional mathematics to women. Orphaned young and educated in an era that routinely excluded women from libraries, advanced classrooms, and graduate fellowships, she became one of the founders and the second president of the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM). The prize that now bears her name is awarded each year to an outstanding undergraduate woman in mathematics.
Born Alice Elizabeth Turner on June 18, 1915, in Richmond, Virginia, she lost both parents early. Her mother died in childbirth; her father died while she was still young. She was raised in Scottsburg, Virginia, by her aunt Pearl Dickerson, with financial help from a second aunt in Richmond. Pearl Dickerson treated her as a daughter and supported her educational ambitions even when local authorities did not. In primary school Alice’s first spark of mathematical interest came from defiance: a teacher told her she would never master long division. She set out to prove the teacher wrong. By high school she wanted to study mathematics at university. The headmaster opposed the plan, insisting mathematics was not for girls and offering help only if she chose history. The University of Richmond nevertheless awarded her a full scholarship.
Westhampton College, the women’s coordinate college of the University of Richmond, sat on one side of a lake; the men’s campus occupied the other. Women were barred from the main library and confined to a “women’s reading room.” Female faculty taught only elementary courses. A dean nevertheless told Turner to take mathematics on the men’s side of the lake. She became the only woman majoring in the subject, won the department’s James D. Crump Prize in her junior year, and earned her B.A. in 1936. After graduation she taught high-school mathematics for three years in Glenn Allen, Virginia, to save money for graduate school. A fellowship finally took her to the University of Chicago in 1939.
At Chicago she studied under Ernest Preston Lane, a specialist in differential geometry. She completed an M.S. in 1940 and a Ph.D. in 1942 with a dissertation on singularities of space curves. Two papers followed. “Two Singularities of Space Curves,” published in the Duke Mathematical Journal in 1944, examined inflection points and planar points on analytic space curves. Using projective coordinates and carefully chosen power-series expansions, Schafer derived results about osculating surfaces, sections of the tangent developable, and projections of the curve. A 1948 paper in the American Journal of Mathematics treated the neighborhood of an undulation point. These remain her principal research publications. Later biographical statements sometimes list abstract algebra and group theory among her specializations, reflecting teaching interests rather than a large body of published work in those fields. Her husband, Richard D. Schafer, whom she met at Chicago and married in 1942 after both received their doctorates, became a leading researcher in non-associative algebras.
The marriage illustrated the classic “two-body problem” of academic couples. Richard served in the Navy; Alice’s first position was at Connecticut College. She later taught at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory during the war years, then at the University of Michigan, Douglass College, Swarthmore, Drexel Institute of Technology, and the University of Connecticut before returning to Connecticut College as a full professor. In 1962, after Richard joined the faculty at MIT, she was appointed full professor at Wellesley College. She chaired the mathematics department from 1963 to 1968, received tenure in 1965, and in 1969 became the Helen Day Gould Professor of Mathematics. A year at the Institute for Advanced Study (1958–59) interrupted the sequence of teaching posts.
At Wellesley she combined administrative leadership with pedagogical experiment. In 1976 she launched a program designed to reduce mathematics anxiety, especially among students who had avoided the subject. It used student tutors, a mathematics laboratory, lectures by women mathematicians, and applications of mathematics to the humanities. Colleagues and former students described her classroom manner as energetic, demanding, and encouraging; she expected high performance yet refused to treat questions as dumb. She retired from the Wellesley faculty in 1980 at age 65 but remained two more years as chair of the college’s Affirmative Action Program. Missing teaching, she then taught at Simmons College and in the Radcliffe College Seminars management program. After Richard retired from MIT in 1988 the couple moved to Arlington, Virginia. At 73 she joined the faculty of Marymount University and continued teaching until a second retirement in 1996, at age 81. She climbed the Great Wall of China at 75 and led delegations to China on women in mathematics and science.
Schafer’s most lasting institutional contribution began in January 1971. At the joint meetings of the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Association of America in Atlantic City, a women’s caucus of the Mathematics Action Group organized the Association for Women in Mathematics. Mary Gray was the first president; Schafer became the second, serving 1973–75. Under her leadership AWM was legally incorporated in 1973 and obtained tax-exempt status in 1974. The association established an office at Wellesley. During her presidency AWM sponsored its first invited mathematical talks and organized an international panel at the 1974 International Congress of Mathematicians in Vancouver. She later chaired the joint AMS-MAA-SIAM Committee on Women in Mathematics and served on numerous other committees concerned with fellowships, human rights, and the status of women. In 1990 AWM created the Alice T. Schafer Mathematics Prize for excellence in mathematics by an undergraduate woman; the prize continues to be awarded annually.
Recognition arrived steadily. The University of Richmond gave her an honorary doctorate in 1964 and Westhampton College a Distinguished Alumna Award in 1977. She was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1985. In 1998 the Mathematical Association of America presented her its Yueh-Gin Gung and Dr. Charles Y. Hu Award for Distinguished Service to Mathematics, its highest honor. The citation noted that her curriculum vitae listed two specializations—abstract algebra (group theory) and women in mathematics—and praised her as a role model who worked to eliminate barriers, create support networks, and secure opportunity for women. It described her as known for “love of people, boundless energy, and fierce determination for a just cause.”
Schafer and Richard were married for 67 years and had two sons, John and Richard, several grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. She died on September 27, 2009, in Lexington, Massachusetts, at 94. In accordance with her wishes there was no funeral. Her papers are held at the Schlesinger Library at Harvard. The prize that carries her name, the organization she helped found, and the generations of women mathematicians who followed her remain the most visible measures of a career spent crossing lakes, libraries, and professional barriers that had been declared closed.