Alice Bache Gould (January 5, 1868 – July 25, 1953) was an American mathematician,[1][2] philanthropist, and historian, who spent much of her time in Puerto Rico, South America and Spain.
Sent home for her education, Bache Gould trained as a mathematician and undertook graduate studies in mathematics, teaching for a time at Carleton College, Minnesota.
[1] Being fluent in Spanish, she began subsequently to follow her true interest in Spanish-American studies, working for several years in the educational system of Puerto Rico.
[4] In 1942, Gould became the only female corresponding member of Real Academia de la Historia and was awarded the Order of Isabella the Catholic (in 1952).
[10] After teaching briefly at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, she became a graduate student in mathematics at the University of Chicago in 1894, studying with E. H. Moore.
[14] In 1901, Gould published a historical monograph on Louis Agassiz in Mark Antony De Wolfe Howe's series of Beacon Biographies of Eminent Americans.
[1][3] She was also a contributor to the Kissinger Relief Fund for the study of yellow fever in 1907,[17] and was approached by Bailey K. Ashford about supporting a Puerto Rican school of tropical medicine.
[18] Later in life, between 1941 and 1947, Gould donated approximately 1,500 items on Puerto Rico to the United States Library of Congress.
In 1911, she went to Spain, stopping to do research on Christopher Columbus and Queen Isabella I of Castile at the Archivo de Simancas and other Spanish archives.
When she realized that she would not be able to return to Spain for some time, she tried to obtain war work in the United States that would allow her to use her mathematical training.
Few options were available, but she eventually had the choice of assisting Forest Ray Moulton at the Ordnance Department in Washington, D.C., doing "routine and monotonous" work as a "computer", or helping her former advisor, E. H. Moore, to teach classes in navigation to Naval ROTC students at the University of Chicago.
[4] and proved that Pedro de Lepe, whose existence had long been disputed, had sailed with Columbus on the Santa María.
[citation needed] Gould found a certified copy of the document that recognized Columbus's descendants rights to his privileges,[21] and was praised particularly for ability to read the penmanship of the court scribes.
[22] Samuel Eliot Morison, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Christopher Columbus, Admiral of the Ocean Sea (1942), described Gould as follows: a "distinguished, gray-haired lady, dressed usually in black bombazine with a vintage hat, striding resolutely into the Archive of the Indies to find some document for me that the archivist insisted did not exist.
[25] In 1952, she was awarded the Order of Isabella the Catholic, presented in Seville by Joaquin Ruiz Jimenez, the Spanish Minister of Education.
After her death, a plaque was placed at the entryway to honor "Miss Alice B. Gould illustrious North American researcher and a great friend of Spain.
The original Spanish reads: "A miss Alice B. Gould, ilustre investigadora norteamericana y gran amiga de España.