WA’s first female maths professor lands top award in Australia Day honours list

“Girls don’t pass maths.”

The warning from teenage Cheryl Praeger’s careers advisor only made the young student push even harder to study the subject at university.

“I got angry, and stubborn, and I wanted even more to be able to study maths,” she recalls.

She went on to be Western Australia’s first female mathematics professor — just the second in the country, after Hanna Neumann in Canberra.

Now, the University of Western Australia Emeritus Professor — a winner of the Prime Minister’s prize for science, WA Women’s Science Hall of Fame inductee, and recipient of many other awards and postings — has been appointed a…