Mary Nicholas Arnoldy
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
March 7, 1893
Sister Mary Nicholas Arnoldy C. S. J., Ph.D. | |
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| Personal life | |
| Born | Katherine Helen Arnoldy March 7, 1893 Tipton, Mitchell, Kansas, US |
| Died | September 28, 1985 (aged 92) Concordia, Cloud, Kansas, US |
| Religious life | |
| Religion | Roman Catholic |
Mary Nicholas Arnoldy (1893–1985) was a Roman Catholic Sister of St. Joseph of Concordia (Kansas), and a mathematician.[1] Along with M. Henrietta Reilly, and Mary Domitilla Thuener, she was one of a very few women and Catholic sisters to earn a doctorate in mathematics before 1940.[2]
She was born Katherine Helen Arnoldy to Anna Katherine Holz (1855–1944), born in Iowa, and Nicholas "Nick" Arnoldy (1844–1920), born in Kaschenbach, Bitburg-Prum, Rheinland-Pfalz, Germany.[3] She had nine sisters and brothers. Each of her parents had an eighth-grade education, and her father worked as a retail grocer.[4]
She went to Catholic grade school in Tipton, Kansas, and then attended Nazareth Academy in Concordia, Kansas. In 1910 she entered the Nazareth Convent, and she professed her first vows in 1912. She and two other sisters joined the Sisters of St. Joseph of Concordia.[5] Her oldest sister Elizabeth, who died at age 29, became Sister Mary Modesta. Her sister Mary became Sister Mary Domitilla (not to be confused with mathematician Mary Domitilla Thuener), and taught biology at the same college where Mary Nicholas Arnoldy would spend her mathematics career. There was also a sister Cleophas Arnoldy, who may have also been a relative.[6]
She taught in Kansas for 17 years before beginning doctoral studies, working at Kansas schools in Antonino and Emmeram (1912)--both near one another—and then traveling three hours away to Manhattan, Kansas (1925).[7] Between the first two and Manhattan she taught in Schoenchen. The sisters had sent a group to open a parochial school there in 1904, and Arnoldy went there in 1917.[8] While teaching she attended undergraduate school. From 1921 to 1923 she was a student at the Fort Hays Kansas State Normal School (now Fort Hays State University). In 1923–24 she broke a barrier at the Jesuits' Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska, by becoming one of the first women to study education there. In the winters she went to New York City to study music, once course at a time, at Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart, in its Pius X School of Liturgical Music. After this somewhat patchwork of education and employment, in 1929 she finally received her bachelor's degree from Kansas State Agricultural College (now Kansas State University).
That same graduation year, 1929, she went to Washington, DC to study at Catholic University of America, earning a master's degree in mathematics in 1930.[9] Then in 1933 she earned a Ph.D. there (minoring in physics and education) with the dissertation, The Reality of the Double Tangents of the Rational Symmetric Quartic Curve, under Aubrey Edward Landry.[10][11]
