A Brief Look At Jacqueline Ferrand

Jacqueline Ferrand was born Alès, France on February 17, 1918. She attended school in Nimes, France, a town that is 40 km south of Alès. The school she attended was called the lycée de Jeunes Filles, which translates to a girl’s high school. It was one of the few schools in France, at the time, which offered an education to women. Ferrand was one of the smartest students the staff had seen and performed especially well in mathematics. After performing extremely well in secondary school she was one of two women excepted to an institute for higher education, or college. This school was École Normale Supérieure de Jeunes Filles, which roughly translates to institute for higher education for women. She attended college from 1936 to 1939,

First, she taught at the University of Lille from 1948-1956. While she taught there she held the chair of calculus and higher geometry. While she oversaw all calculus and higher geometry classes, she made many changes to the program. This included finding better teaching methods and ways to improve the impact geometry had on students’ mathematics studies. Even during the mid 1900’s, when Ferrand was teaching and publishing, women were still not eagerly accepted as smart and successful jobholders. Ferrand had to fight twice as hard as any male contender for the job she held at the University of Lille. Even after she had been instated in her position of power, many of her male coworkers failed to respect and listen to her. Her second contribution to geometry was writing a textbook for the geometry section of the Mathématiques II (Mathematics II). In this textbook, there were two chapters that had not been regularly seen in French geometry textbooks; non-Euclidean geometry and axiomatics of Euclidean geometry. When this textbook was published, one of her first major publications, many people did not want to use it, because a woman wrote it and it had two new and progressive concepts in