Bess Marie Eversull Allen (1899 – 1978) was an American mathematician and one of the few women to earn a PhD in mathematics in the United States before World War II.
[1] Bess Eversull was born May 18, 1899, in Elmwood Place, Ohio, a village that was next to Cincinnati but has since become nearly surrounded by that city.
[1] Eversull attended Woodward High School in Cincinnati and then attended the University of Cincinnati where she graduated with her bachelor's degree in 1921, majoring in both mathematics and English and minoring in French.
Her 1922 master's thesis and her 1924 doctoral dissertation both concerned triple Fourier series[2] and each document was published soon after it was completed.
Shortly thereafter, the couple moved to Detroit and for most of the next 20 years, she volunteered in the community except for 15 months during World War II when she worked as a mathematician for a group making films for the U.S. military, from May 1942 until August 1943.