Emily Kathryn Wyant

In 1930, Wyant took a position at the Northeastern State Teachers College in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, as a professor of mathematics. In 1933, she left Northeastern State to become a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago.^[3] In 1934, she took another faculty position, as head of the mathematics department at Athens College in Athens, Alabama.^[3][6] She became head of the mathematics department there but took an early retirement in 1940 due to poor health.^[3]

Wyant was active in the mathematical honor society Pi Mu Epsilon, in the mathematical graduate student sorority Sigma Delta Epsilon, and in the Mathematical Association of America. She became the national president of Sigma Delta Epsilon in 1926 and chaired the Missouri section of the Mathematical Association of America in 1927,^[3] as its first female officer.^[6]

During Wyant's time at Northeastern, she worked to transform the local mathematics club, founded three years before her arrival, into another national honor society, Kappa Mu Epsilon. The society itself was officially founded in April 1931, and Wyant was elected as its first leader, under the title "President Pythagoras". Through Wyant's efforts in making connections with faculty at other colleges and universities, the group quickly spread. She was succeeded in 1935 by the group's second president, J. A. G. Shirk of Pittsburg State University.^[1] Later, she became the society historian,^[3] and despite her failing health, she traveled with a nurse to the group's national convention in Missouri in 1941.^[2][6]

She died on July 16, 1942.^[3]