When her father died, she and her mother went to live with Millicent's sister Agnes Garrett, who had set up an interior design business on Gower Street, Bloomsbury.

Her score was 13% higher than the second highest, but she did not receive the title of Senior Wrangler (Geoffrey T. Bennett in 1890), as only men were then ranked and women were listed separately.

An anonymous poem written in 1890 paying tribute to Fawcett's great achievement climaxes with the following two stanzas, mentioning the other respected mathematicians Arthur Cayley and George Salmon:[6]Curve and angle let her con and Parallelopipedon and Parallelogram Few can equal, none can beat her At eliminating theta By the river Cam.

The lead story in the Telegraph the following day said: Once again has woman demonstrated her superiority in the face of an incredulous and somewhat unsympathetic world... And now the last trench has been carried by Amazonian assault, and the whole citadel of learning lies open and defenceless before the victorious students of Newnham and Girton.

[7]Following Fawcett's achievement in the Tripos, she won the Marion Kennedy scholarship at Cambridge[8] through which she conducted research in fluid dynamics.

She was ruthless towards mistakes and carelessness... My deepest debt to her is a sense of the unity of all truth, from the smallest detail to the highest that we know[11]Fawcett left Cambridge in 1902, when she was appointed as a lecturer to train mathematics teachers at the Normal School (teacher training college) in Johannesburg, then in Transvaal Colony,[12] now part of the University of Pretoria, South Africa.

[15] The Philippa Fawcett Internship Programme is a summer research program at the Centre for Mathematical Sciences in the University of Cambridge.