Abba Verbeck Newton (February 19, 1908 – May 5, 1996) was a pioneering American mathematician, one of the few women who earned a PhD in mathematics in the United States before the start of World War II.
Samuel Newton worked in Ballston Spa for the American Hide and Leather Company and both Abba and her older sister Katharine Marguerite (1906–1994) were born there.
She enrolled in Mount Holyoke College and earned her BA there in 1929, graduating magna cum laude with majors in both mathematics and chemistry.
She followed with her doctorate, directed by Ernest Preston Lane,[2] awarded in 1933, based on her dissertation titled Consecutive Covariant Configurations at a Point of a Space Curve.
During her years at Vassar, Newton served as a faculty fellow at the Institute Henri Poincaré at the Sorbonne, Paris, France in 1951 and at Duke University in North Carolina in 1966.