Dr. Evelyn Merle Nelson was born in Hamilton, Ontario in 1943. Her parents were Russian immigrants who had settled down in Canada. They were very supportive of their daughter entering the field of mathematics, even though it was difficult for women to get into it at the time. They wanted to support her financially as well, but they didn’t need to because she kept getting scholarships. She attended grade thirteen at Westdale High School in Hamilton and then went on to attend the honors Mathematics-Physics-Chemistry program at the University of Toronto.

After two years there she ended up back in Hamilton to attend McMaster, where she completed the rest of her education. She got her Bachelor of Science in mathematics in 1965 (graduating at the top of her class). She then completed her Masters in mathematics in 1967. Her thesis was “A finiteness criterion for partially ordered semigroups and its application to Universal Algebra”, which ended up being her first published paper (It was published in the Canadian Journal of Mathematics). She also completed her Ph.D in 1970 at McMaster but she decided to do it in four years instead of two. She gave birth to her first daughter while writing her thesis for her doctorate. This thesis was “The lattice of equational classes of commutative semigroups”, which was also published in the Canadian Journal of Mathematics.

Along with writing papers she peer reviewed for ten different journals. She also wrote close to 100 reviews. She was the editor of Algebra Universalis, as well. She was also a sought out speaker and presented at almost thirty lectures outside of Canada. She worked right up until she died of cancer in 1987 at the age of 43. After her death a personal retrospective about Evelyn's life was published in Algebra Universalis, talking about her work and her impact on algebra. She proved semigroups with certain generating sets are finite, along with exploring which groups are finiate and which are infinite.    Since her death the Canadian Mathematical Society gives out the CMS Kriegar-Nelson Prize for Distinguished Research by Women in Mathematics in honor of Evelyn and another Canadian mathematician, Cecilia Kriegar.