Australia Day honours: Passion plus drive adds up to stellar career for Cheryl Praeger

In 1983, when Cheryl Praeger was appointed to a maths professorship at UWA at just 35 years of age, she was the only woman in Australia to hold such a position.

Mathematician Cheryl Praeger receives the highest honour. Picture: Colin Murty

In 1983, when Cheryl Praeger was appointed to a maths professorship at the University of Western Australia at just 35 years of age, she was the only woman in Australia to hold such a position.

Today, at 72, Professor Praeger is recognised as one of the country’s most eminent mathematicians and is one of only four people to be awarded the highest Australia Day honour this year, the Companion of the Order of Australia.

She is pathbreaker for women in mathematics and notes there are now 30 women in Australia who are professors in the mathematical sciences. It is still not at parity with men but “the change has been so dramatic”, she says.

Professor Praeger says that when she was a high school student in Queensland she was passionate about maths but had no idea that a career as a mathematician was possible.

“All I knew was I wanted to learn more mathematics,” she says. “Of course it bothered my mother that I might be doing something which wouldn’t land me a job. But then she heard that I could be a maths teacher at a school, and that was a fine thing and I was allowed to find about doing maths at university.”

She did a bachelor degree at the University of Queensland — where she was the only woman in her maths classes in her final year — and then won a commonwealth scholarship to do a doctorate at Oxford. Even then, she was not certain she would have the opportunity for a maths career.

“I remember thinking, even after doing my PhD, that if I couldn’t get a job I’d have to think about doing something else. Maybe I would be a social worker,” she says.

Instead, her research in pure mathematics quickly gained attention and won her the professorship at UWA, which she juggled with her other tasks as a young mother caring for two small children.

While Professor Praeger’s research in group theory and symmetry is highly theoretical, it has important practical applications. One of them is finding highly ­efficient algorithms that speed up the computer programs used in many areas of science and as well as cryptography.

“This very deep theory makes them run superfast,” she says.

Over the years, Professor Praeger has championed the case for more women in STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths), promoted improvements in maths education and held leadership roles in professional bodies, both in Australia and internationally.

She is a former president of the Australian Mathematical Society, and for nearly two decades chaired the Australian Mathematical Olympiad Committee, which runs enrichment programs for school students.

She says there is more need than ever for mathematicians to help solve today’s problems, such as the coronavirus pandemic and climate change. She also believes there is a need for more people with strong maths skills to become maths teachers.

Unlike many academics, Professor Praeger’s research work intensified toward the end of her career. In 2007 she became the first pure mathematician to win a five year Australian Research Council federation fellowship. It allowed her, for the first time, to focus fully on research and establish the Centre for the Mathematics of Symmetry and Computation at UWA.

“We are really pretty well known now,” she says with pride.

Although officially retired, she continues as an emeritus professor at UWA. Asked whether she is still active in her research she replies: “Every spare moment”.