Elizabeth Monroe Boggs: Bryn Mawr College
Elizabeth Monroe, at right, and Vung-Yuin Ting were two of the three students to graduate summa cum laude from Bryn Mawr College in 1935.
Evening Public Ledger, June 5, 1935.
Attending Bryn Mawr College, a private women’s college outside Philadelphia, allowed the social and intellectual aspects of Monroe’s life to blossom. She made lifelong friends, who like her were inquisitive and ambitious. Already during her first semester, she showed an interest in quantum mechanics and its impact on chemistry. As a natural follow up, she initially pursued a double major in physics and chemistry, but she later focused on mathematics and chemistry, which somehow gave her a less constraining course load.
The arrival of Emmy Noether at Bryn Mawr midway through her studies also changed the local intellectual landscape. The famed mathematician, who was dismissed from the University of Göttingen in 1933 following the enactment Nazi racial laws, built up a group with women graduate students and postdocs on campus. Noether also regularly commuted to the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey, where she met with other German émigrés, including Albert Einstein.
Monroe was given the chance to be tutored by Noether on modern algebra during her senior year, 1934-35. With Monroe picking up some German and Noether learning some English, the two could eventually exchange. A few weeks before the end of the academic year, however, Noether suddenly passed away, leaving Monroe to write her undergraduate thesis with one of Noether’s postdoctoral affiliates.
Monroe nevertheless graduated with summa cum laude with distinction in mathematics and received the college’s prestigious European Fellowship, which she used to study chemistry at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.
Context and sources: “Ancient and Modern Atomic Theories”
Context and sources: Emmy Noether at Bryn Mawr
Cite this resource
Patrick Charbonneau, “Elizabeth Monroe Boggs,” Women in the History of Quantum Physics collection, American Institute of Physics, 2026, https://www.aip.org/history/elizabeth-monroe-boggs.