Adelaide Smith

Adelaide Smith was an American mathematician and educator, born in 1870 in Boone, Iowa, the daughter of Allan Smith and Adelaide Nancy Butler. She graduated from Wellesley College in 1893, taught in Boone, Maryland and Michigan, and in 1899 went to the University of Göttingen on a European fellowship, where she studied with David Hilbert for about two and a half years. She then taught at Huguenot College in South Africa, described as the only women's college south of the equator, and earned a second bachelor's degree from the University of the Cape of Good Hope in 1905. With Jennie R. White she wrote two travel books about South Africa, published in 1907 and 1908. In 1909 she became an instructor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, an appointment reported across the United States, and she took a master's degree in 1911 on a differential equation Hilbert had suggested. She later led the Wellesley School for Girls in Berkeley, the second oldest private school in California.