Born: 15 February 1892, Ireland
Died: 17 April 1983
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Mary de Lellis, Maggie or Margaret
This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Turlough O’Riordan. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Gough, Mary (Sr Mary de Lellis; ‘Maggie’) (1892–1983), educator and mathematician, was born Margaret Gough on 15 February 1892 at the family home in Rickardstown, Kilmore, Co. Wexford, the eldest of the two daughters of Ellen (née Dunne) and Walter Gough. Both of local modest farm labouring families, they married on 14 October 1891 in Kilmore. Walter worked as a farm labourer and acquired five acres there. Gough and her younger sister Lizzie (b. 9 November 1894) both attended a national school run by the St John of God order. ‘Maggie’ (as she was listed in the 1901 census) continued her education in a convent school in the vicinity.
Raised in the widespread poverty then enveloping the community, in August 1909 Gough emigrated to America with a group of other local women. They sailed on the Irak from Liverpool, and joined the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word congregation in San Antonio, Texas. Emerging from France in the seventeenth century, the congregation had expanded into America in 1866 and focused on teaching and serving the sick and indigent. Dressed in ‘rich bridal attire and wearing veils and wreaths of orange blossom’, on 24 July 1910 Gough and thirteen other Irish emigrant postulants (amongst a group of twenty-one) underwent investiture (New Ross Standard, 26 Aug. 1910). Gough took ‘Mary de Lellis’ as her name in religion, likely inspired by Camillus de Lellis (1550–1614), a priest canonised in 1746.
She professed her vows in 1911 while studying at the congregation’s Incarnate Word College in San Antonio. (It had been founded as a school in 1881, later moving to the congregation’s mother house at Alamo Heights, and by 1910 was offering bachelor’s degrees in arts, literature and science as it transformed itself into a higher education institution.) Becoming a teacher, Gough taught initially at catholic elementary (primary) schools in Texas and Missouri. She then taught mathematics at St Mary’s academy, a high school in Amarillo, Texas. In 1920 she gained a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in mathematics from the Catholic University of America (CUA), a pontifical university in Washington, DC. Gough studied at the university’s Catholic Sisters College (CSC), which had been founded in 1911 as a residential institute staffed by academics from the university. This setting was congenial to women religious, who were dispatched there from many orders and congregations to undertake undergraduate and postgraduate degrees, drawn by CUA’s pontifical accreditation and the CSC’s residential setting.
Gough returned to teach mathematics at Incarnate Word College, where she remained for over twenty years, apart from various sabbaticals pursuing postgraduate research. She visited the University of Oklahoma for the second semester of 1921–2, returning to the Catholic University in 1922–3. She was awarded a Master of Arts (MA) in mathematics in 1923 for a thesis submitted to the CSC titled ‘The representability of a number by an indefinite binary quadratic form’, afterwards resuming her teaching at Incarnate Word College.
During summer 1927 Gough undertook research at the University of Texas. She then returned to Washington, DC, where she commenced her doctoral studies at the Catholic University (1927–31). There she was supervised by Aubrey Edward Landy (1880–1972), a Canadian-American mathematician. Landy supervised many women mathematicians (comprising eighteen of the twenty-eight Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) dissertations he oversaw), including Euphemia Haynes (1890–1980) who, in 1943, became the first African American woman to gain a Ph.D. in mathematics. Gough earned her Ph.D. in 1931 with a thesis titled ‘On the condition for the existence of triangles in-and-circumscribed to certain types of the rational quartic curve and having a common side’; her doctoral studies also comprised ‘minors’ in education and physics. She was amongst three other women religious awarded doctorates by the university that year, all supervised by Landy and addressing algebraic geometry. In common with most of the women earning their doctorates from the CUA in the 1930s, Gough obtained the degree with the intention of improving the quality and augmenting the range of teaching provided at catholic women’s institutions, such as Incarnate Word College, which were then transforming themselves into ‘four-year’ colleges.
Gough returned to Incarnate Word College where she taught until 1943, followed by a year teaching mathematics at Incarnate Word Academy in St Louis, Missouri. After some ill health, and hospitalisation at St Anthony’s Hospital, Amarillo, Texas, she transitioned to a desk job. For the next twenty years she was a treasurer and chief accountant at St Joseph’s Hospital, Fort Worth, Texas, which the congregation owned and operated.
Although she never returned to Ireland, Gough remained in touch with her family. Her emigration, enforced by poverty, was emblematic of the paucity of opportunities for women in rural Ireland in the early twentieth century. Her religious life in America engendered her social mobility, which enabled her to become the first Irish woman to obtain a Ph.D. in mathematics. In 1964 Gough retired to live at St Joseph’s convent, San Antonio, amongst other retired women religious. Losing her sight, and enduring the likely effects of dementia, she died there on 17 April 1983 and was buried in the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word cemetery in the city.
Gough was a member of the American Mathematical Society and it is sometimes incorrectly claimed that she invented the term ‘mathemaphobia’. In 2023 the Irish Mathematics Teachers’ Association instituted the Maggie Gough competition, which tests the problem-solving skills of junior and leaving certificate students. South East Technological University launched a funded Ph.D. in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) in the same year to mark Gough’s achievement, part-funded by her descendants.