Person: Edmonds, Sheila May

Sheila Edmonds was an English mathematician who worked infinite series and went on to become Vice-Principal of Newnham College, Cambridge.

Although women could attend classes and take the examinations at the University of Cambridge in Edmonds' time, they could still not graduate with a degree which only became possible in 1947.
Edmonds' doctoral thesis Some multiplication problems was completed in 1944.
In the second of the two papers Edmonds looks at conditions under which the integral from 0 to ∞ of the product of two functions f(x)f (x)f(x) and g(x)g(x)g(x) is equal to the integral from 0 to ∞ of the product of the cosine transforms of the two functions f(x)f (x)f(x) and g(x)g(x)g(x).
In a series of papers published over the following years Edmonds examined a whole variety of different conditions on the functions fff and ggg which give the required equalities.
In 1957 Edmonds published Sums of powers of the natural numbers.
Edmonds wished to give this aspect of her job 100% of her effort, so after 1957 she published no further papers.
Edmonds made important contributions in addition to her teaching.

Born 1 April 1916, Kingston, Kent, England. Died 2 September 2002, Cambridge, England.

View full biography at MacTutor

Origin England, Women

Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0!

O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive