Anna Stafford Henriques
Affiliation
From Attributions, Issue One, 2001:
As a graduate student at the University of Chicago, Anna Stafford’s interest in topology drew her to Princeton University, where Oswald Veblen and James Alexander taught. “So I wrote to Princeton and said I wanted to study topology,” she recalled years later, “and they sent me a postal card saying, ‘We don’t take girls.’” When she read in the New York Times that Veblen and Alexander would be among the Institute’s first Faculty, she wrote to Veblen and was accepted as one of his seventeen postgraduate students in 1933. Stafford spent two years at the Institute, working at a secondary school in Mendham, New Jersey, in the mornings to support herself and attending IAS lectures in the afternoons. She found that she loved to teach, and went on to positions at the Universities of Nebraska and Utah and the College of Santa Fe, where she became a full Professor. At ninety-five, she reflected on her years at the Institute as “two years in Heaven.”
