Women Authors From England

"[Asked if she was bullied at school] I was never punched. I think verbal abuse is potentially worse than being punched in the arm. I got called names every day. I got called Norma-No-Mates and Speccy-Four-Eyes."

"[Q:] What is the trait you most deplore in yourself? [A:] I'm always a bit late, but I don't mind that, because it means that whoever I'm meeting is already there. [Q:] What is the trait you most deplore in others? [A:] I hate it when people are later than me."

"[Asked "End of weekend dread?"] Monday is our Saturday, so no dread. Having different days off to the majority of people is great in so many ways. And working Saturdays means you never have to go to a wedding."

"[Her] comedy depends on the cognitive dissonance between her appearance (primary school teacher in spectacles) and the filth she speaks."

"I got divorced. I've got friends who got divorced and they did not do stand up – good to know it's not obligatory, but I think you have to do something. Some people drink and some people sleep around, and I was like, "I'm going to tell some strangers how sad I am. But in a funny way"."

"As a society we can tolerate questions when things are going well, but when things are going badly we want answers."

"[E]ven though, like it or not, women occupy fifty percent of the human story genetically — I as a historian — I noticed that we only occupy about naught point five percent of official, written record in human history. But, my God, we are there."

"I was the first female historian to present a history series on TV in the UK in the year 2000. Extraordinary. I had no idea... I did the on and said, "Can you find out who was the first?" They said, "It's you." Young girls write to me all the time to say they want to do things like me and it’s the best thing. It makes everything worthwhile. People ask, what's my proudest moment? That response is…"

"I for one (I am sure there are others) rail against the increasingly mediated world we live in, where experience comes packages and second-hand. But we must acknowledge that the majority of the global population will not have the opportunity to visit to see a 15th-centry representation of , or travel to Athens to visit the , or cross the to appreciate 's strategic importance. Nor will they have the time in their working day to sit in a quiet room and spend an uninterrupted morning reading and digesting an academic publication as academics can (sometimes)."

"[J]acking in journalism to become a teacher so late in life wasn’t brave – it was desperate. Though I didn’t admit it at the time, I was entirely burnt out – I had been at the same place for an interminably unimaginative 32 years – and was showing the classic symptoms. I was cynical about the value of what I did and of journalism as a whole – what was all this crazy chasing of ephemera really for? I also felt the columns I was writing were rubbish. The very thought of writing another one was making me feel so sick I had to find a way out and do something else entirely."

"Our blindness to ageism is particularly puzzling as it is a prejudice not against people who are different from us (other races, genders etc) but against our future selves."

"[Q:] What is the best thing about your job? [A:] Chatting. And the fact that I can write about whatever I like. [Q:] And the worst? [A:] Chatting. (I'm always behind with my work) And the fact that I can write about whatever I like - which is terrible when the cupboard is bare of ideas."

"[T]he biggest thing, which readers may find hard to swallow given my entire career has been based on ridiculing others, is that, for my next act, I want to be useful. Yes, I know sticking pins in pompous chief executives is useful in a meta kind of way but that's not the kind of useful I have in mind."

"As I write, I'm interrupted by a dull thud. My partner has discovered medieval ceiling beams in the bathroom above a more recent suspended ceiling. Oops, another section of plaster must have come crashing down — but the sound is muffled as the walls are so thick. Indeed, my sister's housewarming gift of a school playground bell to summon people to dinner has been almost entirely useless — in this house you can't hear a thing."

"How to Bake 𝜋 is a success at explaining what mathematics is and how it is done, using simple, appealing language. It should be a rewarding read for mathematicians and nonmathematicians alike. ...[T]eachers will find plenty to borrow for... classrooms... Cheng frequently strips away technical details in order to show the big picture... [T]he book’s frequent digressions... topology, Arrow’s theorem, fair-division problems, s, the Poincaré Conjecture, the Riemann Hypothesis... [etc.]"

"The premise of “Is Math Real?” is that people have different emotions about math. Some love the math and have little difficulty determining the correct answer to a problem while others loathe and dislike the math and have a difficult time ascertaining the correct response. Many times, a student is humbled or chastised for asking ‘a stupid question’. Author Cheng states that there are no stupid questions. In fact, the most profound concepts in mathematics are learned from asking the simplest of questions. As teachers and professors of math, we should welcome all questions and understand that answering questions is what helps students learn. ... “Is Math Real?” treats mathematical topics in a unique and original way. Discussions on number patterns, Platonic solids, math history, ethnomathematics, and mathematical structures presents the reader with a plethora of ideas on how one can envision mathematics."

"… By relating personal stories, historical examples and mathematical analogies, Cheng explains how, when we rely on simplistic concepts like female and male, and the crusty logic that accompanies those concepts, we cannot have good conversations. As Cheng puts it: “If we object to the idea that ‘men are better,’ it’s not that helpful to declare instead that ‘women are better.’ It pits men and women against each other and sets up a prescriptive framework rather than a descriptive one.” She motivates us to strip away consistent triggers for dumb fights that lead nowhere. What would she have us strip away? This is where Cheng becomes a logician. She wants to carefully think through our associations with the word “success” as they relate to gender."

"London is where powerful people are, on the whole. The best-paid jobs are here, the best-paid egos. London is the capital of power and egos — therefore it's the capital of office affairs as well."

"As a category theorist, Cheng researches relationships. She uses this focus on relationships to address the problem of the divisiveness of arguments around gender equality. She abstracts the ideas and reframes the discussion based on relevant character traits that she demonstrates do not have to be linked to gender. She looks for assumptions that have been made, seeks to discard them, and discovers fundamental relationships. In order to better articulate these relationships, she invents new terminology as a way of preventing futile divisive arguments. These new terms are ingressive and congressive. She defines ingressive behavior as “going into things” where the focus is on the self and is more competitive, individualistic, and adversarial. She defines congressive behavior as “bringing things together” where the focus is on community and is more collaborative, interdependent, and cooperative. She gives many examples to illuminate her definitions. ... Cheng is deeply interested in making mathematics accessible to everyone."

"In my current school the teachers seem happy and have no plans to quit. Many have taught there for 20 or 30 years and educated the parents of the current students. Indeed, teacher turnover is so low that I very nearly didn't get a job. When I started looking last spring, there were 120 vacancies for business studies and economics teachers in London; in the whole of the North East there were only three. In the highest-achieving London academies a quarter of the staff quit every year — not just because they can't afford flats but because they are wrung out by the scale of the work. This is the trade-off: this sort of system gets the best possible GCSE results, but the teachers, and sometimes the students, get burnt out achieving it."

"[T]here are many fields where we use ingressive means to filter people, despite the fact that congressive characteristics would be more useful... and that's the thing that I would like to change."

"I'm not interested in playing sport... because I hate the idea of losing, and I'm not interested in winning, so there's no upside and there's only potential downside..."

"A lot of programs for good mathematicians at a young age are... competitions and... problem solving... and Olympiads, and that is very ingressive..."

"I'm not interested in being right... I'm not interested in winning... but I hate losing, and I don't like being wrong. ...But if it's a situation when nobody is going to lose because we're all trying to understand something together, then there's no risk of losing, and... we can all gain from it."

"If you hate the idea of being... told you're wrong, then you get put off math at a very early age because it's the one subject where you start being told you're wrong a lot, and... if you don't like that... you'll move off into some subject where... you can create things..."

"I love to focus on how to make mathematical activities more congressive... so when I'm teaching art students I do a lot of activities where there is no right and wrong... [W]e're not trying to achieve an answer, we're trying to explore... [W]e build something. It's more craft-like. ...[M]aybe we're trying to build s, but it doesn't really matter if you didn't... [A]long the way we discover how triangles fit together and... how versatile an equilateral triangle is... and that you can make all sorts of shapes... and some... are Platonic solids... [E]veryone can explore... and... in the world of , this is... "low floor/high ceiling" activities where there's a very low floor to entry and a very high ceiling, so if someone really does want to go far they can, but... there's no real failure, because everyone has done something. ...[I]f we do more of that, then we will stop putting off congressive people from mathematics."

"People in professional jobs work for three reasons: money, status and the interest of the work itself. The main reason those in their fifties become sluggish is not that their minds are going, nor that the work itself has become too monotonous. It is that neither money nor status move them as they used to and the interest of the job is not enough to keep them going on its own."

"[S]o mathematics comes up with abstract ways of studying these, where... it... looks like pieces of string, but how can I study them as if they were pieces of string without actually waving pieces of string around... [T]here are all sorts of practical situations where it's not practical to wave... string around."

"On returning, she got off the 214 bus outside our house, and spotted a familiar pram being pushed up the front steps. The person propelling it was a stranger — a sinister woman, tall with pointy glasses and a gash of lipstick. It would be nice to say that my earliest memory was looking up from my pram and seeing a prototype of Edna Everage. Instead, I comfort myself with the idea that I may have been the only person in history to be so unmoved by the sight of the housewife superstar — who went on to convulse the world and once rendered the then Prince Charles and Camilla helpless with mirth by simply turning up in their box at the London Palladium — that I slept through the whole thing."

"I've invented some new words... ingressive to replace masculine and congressive to replace feminine... Ingressive is a character trait... a behaviour... about going forward... not being waylaid about what people say... being competitive and winning. Congressive is about bringing things together and... shedding light and understanding... helping people... and maybe we are presenting mathematics at school in a very ingressive way, because it's often about being right... getting the right answer."

"What if the pieces of string aren't really... string, but they're s? ...[M]aybe ...early diagnosis of Alzheimer's may come from looking at... the tangledness of brain cells that mutate... So an abstract way of telling whether it's tangled is... useful."

"Math, unfortunately is presented in this very ingressive way, despite the fact that when you get to the research level, it's very congressive."

"If we strip away the paint... the windows and the non-structural walls of this building, we'll get to the structural walls... and then this building will look a lot more like a lot of other buildings... I don't know which are the load bearing walls, and I don't need to, but it's a good thing that somebody does... [T]hat's true of all abstract structures."

"We can go through life, and this is why people do believe they can go through life without needing to know any maths... [S]o when... we go "Math is really important!" They can just go, "Well, I don't... do any of those things, and I'm just fine." ...Yeah, you can be just fine, but wouldn't you like to be better?"

"[I]f you know where the s are, you can... use things better, you can make things better. You can improve them. You can fix them when they go wrong."

"So this piece... is written in , like many pieces of Bach are. So the four lines... are independent lines of music that went their way... by themselves... [E]ach... could be sung by a person."

"When I drew this picture it enabled me to understand the piece better, but moreover, it helped me understand why I didn't understand the piece, because the voices got wound... between each other in a way that was difficult to follow until I drew this diagram... [I]t enabled me to follow the lines of music as I was playing... which... enables me to play it better. ...This is the point of understanding the s inside things."

"[T]hen I started my PhD and discovered that in higher dimensional category theory... the braids show the coherence of the structure inside some higher dimensional categories, and I didn't know this when I first drew this picture, and then I... said "Wow!" I was studying braids before I was even studying braids..."

"[T]his is one of my favorite pieces of Bach... the Prelude in G minor from Book 2 of the preludes and fugues The Well-Tempered Clavier... [T]here is a huge quantity of maths in Bach. Because... the tuning system enabled him to write in every key, for the first time ever... he wrote a prelude and fugue in every key. There are 12 keys on the piano. He wrote in major and minor, so that made 24 preludes and fugues. Then he got really excited, and did it again, so that made 48..."

"[T]hat's why we move into the abstract world of ideas, where things behave the way that we want them to... [T]hat can be a scary move... because... in the real world you get to touch things... throw things... Whereas in the abstract world... if the logic doesn't do the thing that you want... There's nothing you can do about it. That's just how it works... [T]he upside... is that if you align yourself with the way logic is supposed to work, then everything behaves the way you want it to, because everything behaves perfectly logically... [I]t is the only place where everything behaves perfectly logically."

"It... [abstract structure] is a beautiful thing, and sometimes all that matters is that it's a beautiful thing."

"[W]e can try and apply logic to other areas of life... [I]t's very frustrating if we try... with the expectation that that works. ...[I]t doesn't mean we shouldn't try ...[I]t's always good to try and understand everything else according to logic, but... this is the fate of many mathematicians who... get... frustrated with the actual world, because nothing behaves the way we want... Whereas in the beautiful mathematical world everything does behave..."

"All our dreams can come true as long as we have the right dreams... [A]s long as we think logically, this is the world where everything behaves correctly, and... where any toy we want, we can play with, as soon as we've dreamed it up."

"[T]his is from the second Book and you can almost hear his excitement at being able to write in all these keys, that he was unable to... [do] before... [S]ometimes I think when he gets to the keys... the most far away from ones he could previously write in, things become almost simpler, because he's just enjoying the sheer joy of being in f-sharp major for the first time in his life..."

"With jobs, as with parties, it is best to leave when you are still having a good time."

"I make it my business to help everybody understand these things a bit more, because... they're very misunderstood..."

"I don't believe that one should have anything without sharing it, and that includes knowledge, money, food, love..."

"I wrote this book because I love maths, and I love food... [S]adly most people love food more than they love maths..."

"I believe very strongly in helping other people understand things. There's no point knowing things if you don't help other people know..."

"Math... is... misunderstood, and most people think it's all about numbers, and it's not... [M]ost people think it's about getting things right and wrong, and it's not. ...[I]t's more like cooking ...[Y]ou decide you're just going to fiddle around in the kitchen with some ingredients and make something, and the only thing that matters is if you like it or not. ...In the end all that matters is ...you make your own rules, and then you follow them and see what happens. ...[M]aybe you cause a contradiction ...then your whole world implodes, and that's ok. You move on to the next world."