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When Dorothy Gilford enrolled at the UW to study mathematics in 1935, the department’s one female professor warned her that mathematics was not a promising career for women. Gilford barreled ahead anyway, and went on to become a wildly successful statistician.
Gloria Hewitt similarly defied the odds decades later, when she earned a PhD in mathematics at the UW—only the seventh African-American woman at any university to earn a mathematics PhD. She became a professor and department chair at the University of Montana.
This year, UW endowments have been established in the names of both women: The Dorothy Morrow Gilford Endowed Chair of Statistics in the Department of Statistics, and the Gloria Hewitt Endowed Graduate...