Do you like math? Do you like ladies? Well get ready cause it’s about to get crazy up in here.
If you don’t like math, that’s fair. Math is hard and stressful. I came to college thinking I was gonna be a drama major because I was like: no oh no, math is scary, please go away. Now I’m applying to do summer research at Kenyon for math. Life is too much, man.
A recent winner of the Fields Medal (if you don’t know what that is, it’s cool, it will be explained later), Maryam Mirzakhani, was quoted saying she thought many students with mathematical potential don’t give math a chance because mathematics can seem unexciting at first. She even said that she originally did poorly in mathematics (Source). So if you have a fear of math, you are not alone. When I was in middle school I came home crying nearly every day because of my math classes. I truly thought I did not have the mathematical mind necessary to do well.
Many women also subscribe to this idea. When my mother was growing up, she said that many times she was the only girl, or maybe one of two girls, in her upper level math classes. Instead of assuming that this was simply because girls were not awarded the same intellectual opportunities as boys, many teachers took this to mean that girls simply didn’t have the mathematical minds necessary for the subject. This idea persists even though it has been scientifically proven that women have no biological disadvantage when it comes to learning in STEM fields (Source).
Why does it matter? Well, that’s a complicated question. From Mirzakhani’s standpoint, we know that if women don’t go into mathematics then we lose crucial minds that could assist with new findings. But if people have the perception that women are not proficient in mathematics, then many women can end up not getting credit for their work. There are many examples of this, as anyone who recently saw Hidden Figures can tell you.
Albert Einstein is famously quoted saying that his wife did many of his calculations. But what did that actually mean? His wife, Mileva Maric, was an incredible physicist and mathematician. She was the only woman who attended university with Einstein and she assisted in the conception and execution of the Theory of Relativity. Yet you’ve probably never heard of her. Einstein is a household name, because he knew more about patenting than Maric, so almost all of the papers were in his name. Einstein would eventually leave Maric in 1916, plunging her into a deep depression and destroying her reputation as a physicist.
Maric not only had to care for her children, but also perform the intense mathematical calculations that were key to Einstein’s work (Source). Yet she is completely erased from the history of physics because she was not seen as equal to Einstein. Luckily, strides are being made for feminism in the world of mathematics. The recent film Hidden Figures tells the story of Katherine G. Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson. Johnson, most notably, comes up with much of the analytic geometry necessary for some of NASA’s first missions. Her persistence in attempting to get co-authorship on many of her papers is reminiscent of Maric’s patent issues with Einstein. However, the film sheds a light on these three remarkable women, who were groundbreaking in the fields of mathematics, engineering and computer science.
Groundbreaking in her field today, Maryam Mirzakhani has achieved a feat that is comparable to Marie Curie’s nobel prize. The Fields Medal is awarded every four years to those that complete a mathematical achievement and have promise for future achievement. The mathematicians chosen must be under 40 years old, and four of them are chosen (Source). She was awarded this in honor of her contribution to our understanding of curved structures. Although as a girl growing up in Tehran she originally dreamed of being a writer, she fell in love with mathematics and compares it to puzzle-solving. She is fascinating in her understanding of mathematics, as she uses many disciplines to understand her own narrow field, low dimensional topology. While her work may not have an obvious application, it does have certain implications for studies of physics and quantum mechanics (Source).
For women like me and my mom, this achievement marks the beginning of a new chapter in the history of women in STEM. When my mother was going to to college and graduate school, many people looked at her strangely when she stated she was a math major. Here at Kenyon, six out of fifteen members of the math faculty are women (not all are professors), and people only really look at me strangely because Kenyon is the most artsy school ever. During my mother’s time, she was lucky if even one of the professors in her department was a woman.
Despite this progression, women are still often challenged to prove their merit above others in mathematics. As more women are recognized for their achievements, it encourages progressive attitudes within the field; however, it is necessary that we study the history of women in STEM. Just like you would criticize the oppression of women in any other setting, we have to do the same with mathematics. How many times has a man’s contributions overshadowed the collaboration between two parties? Where are the holes in the history of women in mathematical achievement? How have white women disregarded the work of women of color in the field?
It upsets me now to think that other people had convinced me of my own inadequacy. How many other girls have been left out of the constantly-changing field of mathematics due to a disbelief in their own abilities?
These are questions that are being asked with more frequency now. As we look critically at STEM and it’s prejudices towards women, complex mathematical problems will be solved with more velocity (f double prime) to find the sum (not a Riemann sum) of the numbers (both rational and irrational) that make up our world.
(I know that last sentence didn’t make any sense but now that I’m in my second semester of calculus the amount of math puns I can make has increased tenfold. I’m seriously hoping some math people will read this whole article and get to the very end and think what I just said was funny.)
Basically, representation in math will open up the field to a new generation of problem solvers and puzzle-lovers. So I hope Maryam Mirzakhani, and all mathematicians like her, keep rocking the world of mathematics one function at a time.