Alice Turner Schafer (June 18, 1915 – September 27, 2009) was an American mathematician. She was one of the founding members of the Association for Women in Mathematics in 1971.
Early life
Alice Elizabeth Turner was born on June 18, 1915, in Richmond, Virginia. She received a full scholarship to study at the University of Richmond. She was the only female mathematics major. At the time, women were not allowed in the campus library. She was a brilliant student and won the department's James D. Crump Prize in mathematics in her junior year. She completed her B.A. degree in mathematics in 1936.
For three years Alice was a secondary school teacher, accruing savings to pay for graduate school.
At University of Chicago, Alice was a student of Ernest Preston Lane, author of Metric Differential Geometry of Curves and Surfaces (1940) and A Treatise on Projective Differential Geometry (1942).
Alice studied differential geometry of curves and implications of the singular point of a curve. When a curve has null binormal, it is planar at that point. Duke Mathematical Journal published her work in 1944. Alice continued her investigations into curves near an undulation point, publishing in American Journal of Mathematics in 1948.
