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Winthrop Professor Cheryl Praeger has become the first woman to win Australia's premier award for mathematicians.

The Thomas Ranken Lyle Medal recognises outstanding achievement by a scientist in Australia for research in mathematics or physics. It has been presented at the Academy of Science since 1935.

Last month Professor Praeger became the first woman to be awarded the medal in its almost 80-year history. She is the Director of UWA's Centre for the Mathematics of Symmetry and Computation, in the Faculty of Engineering, Computing and Mathematics.

Her acceptance speech noted how pleased Professor Praeger was to receive the medal from Professor Suzanne Cory, only the second woman to be President of the Australian Academy of Science.

"It is especially nice, since I am the first woman to be awarded the Lyle medal. I'd also like to add that I am enjoying the privilege of serving on the Executive of the International Mathematical Union with its first woman President, Professor Ingrid Daubechies," she said.

"It's important that girls as well as boys are able to see what may be possible for them, and that it is important to keep studying mathematics and science."

As a school leaver, Professor Praeger was discouraged from studying mathematics, a counsellor suggesting she become a teacher or a nurse.  But she persevered, studying mathematics at the University of Queensland, becoming enamoured with algebra and specialising in the theory of groups, which can be regarded as the mathematical representation of symmetry. She completed her doctorate at Oxford.

Professor Praeger has been on the staff at UWA since shortly after her postdoctoral positions at the ANU and the University of Virginia in the early 1970s.