It wasn’t a conversation I’d expected to have. I was visiting my mother-in-law Mary, who is 100 years old and ensconced in the apartment at the seniors residence where she’s lived since she turned 90. She was speaking about her time in the math club at university. 

Mary told me that she’d had two good friends there, two other women mathematicians. One had gone on to study under Alan Turning at Cambridge. The other had become a mathematics professor at New York University. Both had enjoyed remarkable careers.

With the lockdowns a memory, Mary and I have started having regular tea visits, although I’ve become “that nice lady who comes to see me.” Apparently the people who run the residence have set up our visits to keep her occupied. She told my husband she enjoys them, although they leave her a little perturbed. The lady seems to know more about her life than a stranger should.

That afternoon, I was a little perturbed as well. I’d gone to the drugstore earlier that week, lining up to fill a prescription. There were a few people behind me in the line, but a guy ignored us and headed for the prescription counter. 

“Excuse me,” I said, “but the line-up’s over here.” 

He turned and answered in an overdone oily voice, “Oh, I’m very sorry. I didn’t see the line-up or I would have got in. My apologies for the mix up.” Taking his place at the end of the line, he pretend-coughed, saying very clearly with each cough, “Cunt. Cunt.” 

It was a tiny incident. Miniscule. Yet it’s far from the only time I’ve had the c-word thrown at me since the start of the pandemic, and it’s never been for anything significant. I told my mother-in-law what happened (although, being a nice lady, I toned down the vocabulary). Mary has a very firm grip on the past, even though the present is getting a little hazy. I asked her whether she’d seen this type of response to stress before. Had peoples’ tempers started fraying a couple of years into World War II?

Speaking of living under pressure. Mary had once told me about running into three young men she’d gone to high school with not long after they’d all graduated in 1940. All three were in uniform. Not one survived the war. 

This time she paused to think about what I’d said.

“I don’t remember any of that,” she replied. “If you had to line up, you lined up. People got on with it. The changes were more subtle.”

Subtle how? And for whom?

“For women,” she said, and smiled. Because in this case, she said, the changes were positive, opportunities opening up with men away at war. 

After Mary had graduated from North Toronto Collegiate, she went on to Victoria College at the University of Toronto. That’s where she joined the math club with three friends from high school. One of the women she soon lost track of. The other two were the ones who went on to distinguished careers as pioneering female mathematicians. 

The first, Cathleen Synge, lived a block away from Mary’s family in Leaside, their houses on either side of Mt. Pleasant Cemetery. Cathleen was the daughter of an Irish-Canadian family. Her mother, Eleanor Allen Synge, had some training in mathematics, while her father, John Lighton Synge, was a mathematician and professor at the University of Toronto. 

He was also a nephew of the Irish playwright, John Millington Synge. Obviously, there was a history of both math and accomplishment in her family, but Mary said that women trying to enter a career in mathematics were faced with high barriers and a distinct lack of support before the war opened things up. Even Cathleen’s father hadn’t been keen on his daughter becoming a mathematician.

The other woman was Beatrice Worsley, whom Mary called Trixie. Before they graduated from the University of Toronto, naval recruiters came to campus wanting to talk to anyone who had studied math. Mary remembered lining up for an interview, and caught a glimpse of what the Navy recruiter scribbled on her form: pleasant personality. 

“I didn’t have the marks,” she said, laughing gently. But Trixie Worsley did, and she was in her naval uniform on the day they graduated from Victoria College. 

“Someone had given her a big bouquet, an armful of red roses. She said to me, ‘Mary, will you carry my flowers for me? Because I can’t do it while I’m in uniform.’” Mary teared up, remembering her graduation day almost eighty years ago. “So I carried her roses.”

Beatrice Worsley would go on to work for the navy in Halifax. (That’s her picture up top.) According to the Canadian Encyclopedia, “Worsley performed data analysis related to degaussing ships, a process that reduced the ships’ magnetic signature to make them safer around German magnetic mines. After the Second World War ended in 1945, Worsley was the only member of the (women’s naval service) to remain at the NRE. She was promoted to lieutenant and began research on hull corrosion, which involved over 150 days of research at sea, often in harsh winter conditions.”

After doing her master’s degree in math and physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Trixie returned to Canada and began work in the emerging field of computer science. In 1948, she built a differential analyzer, an early mechanical analog computer that could solve equations, using parts from a toy Meccano set. 

Then she went off to Newnham College at Cambridge University, where she did her PhD under the supervision of the legendary Alan Turing. Trixie later taught at the U of T and at Queen’s University, a pioneering coder before anyone even used the word. Mary’s old friend died when she was only 50. She’d been the first woman computer scientist in Canada.

Cathleen Synge lived a much longer life, most of it in the U.S., where she added the name of her husband, chemist Herbert Morawetz, to her own. After doing her master’s degree at MIT, Cathleen Synge Morawetz did her PhD at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University, where she became a professor. 

Eventually Cathleen was named the first woman director of the Courant Institute, and became the second female president of the American Mathematical Society. She was also presented with the National Medal of Science by President Bill Clinton in 1998, the highest scientific honour in the US. Along with her other accomplishments, Cathleen Synge’s work on wave equations led to the improved design of wings for supersonic aircraft. She died in 2017, aged 94.

These were brilliant women, world-beaters. But Mary told me she feels it was that tiny break, the opening women were given during World War II, that helped her friends toward their goals. 

As for Mary herself, she was recruited by Canadian meteorological service, where she worked with a group of other women organizing and mapping weather data from across the country. Her salary was $100 a month. “Cathleen was not a detail person,” she told me. “I was better in the lab.” In fact, Mary was so good with details that after two years at the meteorological service, she was invited to write her civil service exams and passed easily. 

“So I became a public servant. I had dotted all the I’s and crossed the T’s, and kept out of trouble, so they we were. But then I had the dumb idea to marry John,” a meteorologist and her husband in a happy marriage of almost sixty years. “I was hired in wartime, but had to quit when I got married. It was just the way things were then. Didn’t make any sense at all. Just when I was getting good at it, I was gone.”

Maybe that’s why the differences of life in wartime looked subtle to Mary. Opportunities opened up for a few short years before they snapped shut again. It took a couple of times asking, but finally she heard my question about whether she would have liked to have been a meteorologist herself. “Well, yes,” she said quietly, and looked aside.

I was talking about this last night with a friend who pointed out that my new novel, Time Squared, centres on the changing roles of women through the centuries. Maybe there’s an obsession here. I keep hoping we’re not moving backwards but I’m afraid we are, whether it’s a case of women staying at home with the kids during the pandemic or being called names in the drugstore. 

But for the moment, let’s celebrate Cathleen Synge Morawetz, Trixie Worsley and Mary Knox, pioneering women mathematicians. There are precious few positives these days. But here are three.

Edited on April 26, 2026. Mary died a few months after that visit, not far shy of 101.