Post by Pat Ballew

1934 Mary Emma Byrd (November 15, 1849 – July 13, 1934) was an American educator and is considered a pioneer astronomy teacher at college level. She was also an astronomer in her own right, determining cometary positions by photography. Mary E. Byrd was born November 15, 1849, in Letoy, Michigan, to the reverend John Huntington Byrd and Elizabeth Adelaide Lowe as the second of six children. [A point of clarification since I have lived in Michigan for 50+ years, there are three small communities I Michigan named Le Roy or Leroy. Another mathematician/astronomer , Forrest Ray Molten, was also born in LeRoy, but not the same one as Mary. She was born in the Leroy a few miles south of Battle Creek along Mi 66. The community is now known as East Leroy. The name is often misspelled as Le Roy, but was named for Leroy Fish, son of the first settler in the area] In the late 19th century it was very difficult for a young woman to get higher education. Mary Byrd was a teacher, on and off, while trying to get an education. Byrd graduated from Leavenworth High School. She attended Oberlin College from 1871 to 1874, when John Millott Ellis was the college president. She left Oberlin before graduating and graduated from the University of Michigan with a B.A. in 1878. In 1879 Byrd worked as the principal of Wabash High School in Indiana until 1882, when she left to study astronomy at Harvard College Observatory under Dr. E.C. Pickering. She received the degree of Doctor of Philosophy from Carleton College in 1904. n 1883 she became the First Assistant at the Godsell Observatory at Carleton College, and in 1887 she was appointed Director of the Smith College Observatory and professor of astronomy. Byrd had a particular research interest in "fixing positions of comets by micrometer measures of their distance from known stars." In 1906, Byrd, at the height of her career, resigned from her positions at Smith because the college accepted money from Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, which she found reprehensible. Upon her resignation, she returned to Lawrence, Kansas. She continued writing, and contributed many articles to Popular Astronomy magazine. During her life Byrd was a member of the Astronomical and Astrophysical Society of America (now the American Astronomical Society or simply AAS), the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, the British Astronomical Association, the Anti-Imperialist League of Northampton, the American Mathematical Society (Ref. New York Mathematical Society list of members June 1892, page 6. *Wik