Earlier this summer I did this livestream (https://youtu.be/XwdgxMARr9c), in which I ended up finding a lot of examples of simple quasigroups showing up. I took a look at Bruck's 1944 paper on the subject (https://www.ams.org/journals/bull/1944-50-10/S0002-9904-1944-08236-0/S0002-9904-1944-08236-0.pdf), and I saw an unusual pronoun show up: her.

Now there are a few usual suspects for women in early abstract algebra, but not too many. In order of decreasing proximity to quasigroup theory, we have Ruth Moufang (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Moufang), Hanna Neumann (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanna_Neumann), and Emmy Noether (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether). The woman in question was new to me: Harriet Griffin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harriet_Griffin).

Strangely, Bruck refers to Griffin as "Miss Griffin" rather than "Dr. Griffin", although he references her PhD thesis work. I'm not sure what his intent was in specifying her gender.

In any case, I'm always happy to discover another woman who was an early pioneer in non-associative algebra.

#math #algebra #WomenInSTEM #WomenInAcademia #AbstractAlgebra #UniversalAlgebra