Helen Frances Cullen (January 4, 1919 – August 25, 2007)[1] was an American mathematician specializing in topology. She worked for many years as a professor of mathematics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst[2] and was the first female faculty member in the mathematics department at Amherst.[3] She was known as the author of the book Introduction to General Topology (Heath, 1968),[4] as well as for her outspoken antisemitism.[5]
Cullen was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts, and studied at Girls' Latin School and Radcliffe College.[2] She earned a master's degree at the University of Michigan in 1944,[6] and completed her Ph.D. at Michigan in 1950. Her dissertation, A Set of Parabolic Regular Curve Families Filling the Plane and Certain Related Reimann Surfaces, was supervised by Wilfred Kaplan.[7] She was a faculty member in the department of mathematics at Amherst from 1949 until her retirement as a professor emerita in 1992.[2]
In 1998 the Girls' Latin School – Boston Latin Academy Association listed her as one of their outstanding alumnae.[3]