Anna Adelaide Stafford Henriques (August 20, 1905 – November 28, 2004) was an American mathematician known for her pioneering role as a female researcher at the Institute for Advanced Study.
[2] She became a school mathematics and science teacher in New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, while attending summer classes at the University of Chicago.
[2] She became interested in topology after seeing a talk by Raymond Louis Wilder,[1] and became a student of Mayme Logsdon at Chicago, completing her doctorate in 1933 with a dissertation on Knotted Varieties.
[3] In preparation for her postdoctoral studies, Stafford had applied to Princeton University to work with James Waddell Alexander II and Oswald Veblen, but was rejected because she was female.
She then wrote directly to Veblen, who had been newly appointed to the Institute for Advanced Study (also in Princeton, New Jersey, but separate from the university), and after talking to him when he visited Chicago, she was accepted there.