Beverly Hargraves ’71 is quick to brush aside the idea that she’s a pioneer. “I was used to doing what I was interested in,” she says. “I wasn’t raised to worry about what other people were saying.” Still, she was one of the first women from Carleton to earn a PhD in math, breaking new ground for women in her discipline.
While her PhD from the University of Minnesota was in abstract algebra, a field she hadn’t touched as an undergraduate, she still felt prepared by her Carleton education. “It [a Carleton education] provides confidence in yourself that you can learn anything. And that confidence is right.” Hargraves’s work was on the existence of regular orbits for nilpotent groups, which isn’t easily describable outside of the jargon. As one of her mentors at Carleton, Professor John Dyer-Bennet used to say, “one of the things that makes math hard is that the words just mean what they mean,” she says with a laugh.
The confidence she could learn anything came in handy again when designing “safe-escape” programs for Navy pilots to avoid, in her words, “blowing themselves up.” The fact that she hadn’t done that much coding outside of a five-week course she took at Carleton didn’t bother her. “Computer programming is very logical, like math. If you work a mathematical problem, you can tell if you got it right. It’s much less nebulous than other subjects.”
The value of supporting Carleton has always been clear to Hargraves. She’s been contributing to the Alumni Annual Fund for more than two decades, and her former classmate, Tom Lechner ’71, had long been urging her to join the Joseph Lee Heywood Society to supplement that giving in a more long-term way. When the class of ’71 50th reunion matching campaign began, Hargraves saw it as a sign the time was right.
“The matching made me get to it, stop procrastinating,” she says. “I think people should give money to support academia, and why wouldn’t I give that money to a school I went to? Carleton is a great place with great people.”