Dorothy Rice Sims a mutual friend, George Biddle, and wrote in her 1938 autobiography, "Curiouser and Curiouser", "I inquired Waldo’s height—he was six feet two. This seemed a dignified height. I told George to produce Waldo, which he did. We got married in Madrid, in a German Methodist Church, with the American vice-consul, who was a Filipino, to make it legal.” A website using the name "Mile High Club" regards the "Club's" "founder" as pilot and design engineer Lawrence Sperry as the "Club's" "founder", along with "socialite Mrs. Waldo Peirce" (Dorothy Rice Sims) citing their flight in an autopilot-equipped Curtiss Flying Boat near
Pauline Sperry Under the guidance of Ernest Julius Wilczynski, her doctoral thesis, "Properties of a certain projectively defined two-parameter family of curves on a general surface", drew on his work as the founder of the American school of projective differential geometry. She earned her PhD in mathematics and astronomy in 1916 and was elected to the Sigma Xi honor society. After a year teaching again at Smith, Sperry spent the rest of her academic career at the University of California at Berkeley, beginning in 1917. In 1923, she became the first female assistant professor in the mathematics department at the university. Her