The Krieger-Nelson Prize was inaugurated to recognize outstanding research by a female mathematician. The first prize was awarded in 1995.

Cecelia Krieger was born in Jaslo, Poland in 1894. She studied mathematics and physics at the University of Toronto beginning in 1920. In 1930, Krieger became the first woman - only the third person overall - to earn a mathematics doctorate from a Canadian University. After 12 years of lecturing in mathematics and physics at the University of Toronto, she became an assistant professor and taught there until her retirement in 1962. She is best known for her translation of Sierpinski's celebrated Introduction to General Topology (1934) and General Topology (1952).

Cecelia Krieger died in 1974.

Evelyn Nelson

Evelyn M. Nelson, the daughter of Russian immigrants, was born in Hamilton, Ontario, in 1943. She began her studies at the University of Toronto in the Mathematics/Physics/Chemistry honours program, before transferring to McMaster University. She earned her Master's degree in 1967 and published her thesis, on the "Finiteness of semigroups of operators in Universal Algebra". Her 1970 Ph.D. thesis, completed just after the birth of her first child, examined "The lattice of equational classes of commutative semigroups". In the late 1970's, she began a study of algebraic problems arising in theoretical computer science; several of her papers appeared in computer science journals. From 1982 to 1984, she chaired the Computer Science Unit within McMaster's Mathematics Department.

Evelyn Nelson died in 1987.