Ellen Burrell

Burrell was born in Lockport, New York, the daughter of Myron Louis Burrell and Mary Jones Burrell. She earned a bachelor's degree from Wellesley College in 1880, in the same class as her future colleagues Katharine Lee Bates and Charlotte Fitch Roberts.^[1] She went to Germany for further studies at Göttingen in 1896 and 1897.^[2]

Burrell taught at Rockford Seminary in Illinois for several years, from 1881 to 1886. She returned to Wellesley to teach in 1886.^[3] In 1897, as a solution to her contentious relationship with fellow mathematics professor Ellen Hayes, she was made head of the Department of Pure Mathematics (and Hayes became head of Applied Mathematics).^[4] Her department included professors Roxana Vivian and Helen Abbott Merrill.^[5] She and Hayes both retired from Wellesley in 1916, and the departments were reunited.^[6] She was also curator of the college's herbarium.^[2] Her class notes were privately published as "The Number System" and "Synthetic Projection Geometry".^[4]

Burrell attended the fourth colloquium of the American Mathematical Society in Boston in 1903,^[7] and another 1903 meeting of the society held at Columbia University.^[8] She was also active in the Association of Mathematics Teachers of New England.^[9] She visited the American School for Girls in Constantinople in 1907.^[10]

Burrell enthusiastically voted for Warren G. Harding for president in 1920.^[11] She died in 1938, aged 88 years, in Roxbury, Massachusetts.^[2] Her papers are in the Wellesley College Archives.^[4]