women-mathematicians

"I’m interested in discovering how many different combinations and possibilities there are within such a system and how I can calculate them."

"My parents wanted me to become a doctor, but I didn't get into the program."

"Without an education, you can't get anywhere in Egypt, and the competition for jobs is very high."

"I remember the math classes there with horror and dread. The classroom was dark, and the teacher had a completely expressionless face and voice. I thought, am I going to sit here and do these math problems day in and day out?."

"Getting a math assignment done is almost better than sex and orgasm."

"Is it serious that children and young people cannot read and write, but it is okay that they cannot calculate and interpret the numbers around them when they appear in subjects and contexts other than mathematics class? It is not much to demand that teachers who will teach our children in the various subjects at school have basic skills in mathematics."

"This initiative matters to me because I have lived the challenges it seeks to address. As a young woman in mathematics, I was often the only female in my classes, with few role models to turn to. I know first-hand how isolation, lack of guidance, and absence of representation can deter talented girls from pursuing their STEM dreams."

"Through mentorship, these young women not only excelled academically but also gained confidence and inspiration to pursue their dreams"

"The lack of female role models in mathematics was one of my earliest challenges, and it often meant battling feelings of isolation in my field"

"everyone deserves the right to learn."

"I hope that I am able to dispel the idea that mathematics is “hard” or difficult, by sharing my love and the numerous applications of the subject and its undeniable beauty."

"Gender representation is vital - not just in mathematics but in every discipline. It is common knowledge that the sum of the parts equals the whole. Suppose we view the whole as our society. Who was contributing to the sum of the parts in mathematical discoveries? In the past, it was male representation. Imagine what could have happened if we had female representation in the past and if females had equal opportunities to contribute to mathematical discoveries."

"In this respect I recall with much sympathy the writer Virginia Woolf who wrote about this need for private space (A Room of One’s Own) as a condition for liberty and creativity. I had a room of my own only by the end of high school, of which I have excellent memories."

"It was not exactly as you say. In practice, the 12 of us never lived at home at the same time, because the family grew up with 22 years between the eldest to the youngest (the last one was born in 1968). My elder sisters left early, and I am the tenth. In my first memories, there were only five or six siblings at home. The worst was not to have a room of my own. The house was big, but the rooms were not many, however large."

"I loved mathematics and wanted to go as far as I could."

"They did not accept that I was here, studying with them."

"The reasoning since my young age. At the High School, I was seduced by Analysis, and trigonometry I was fan of argumentations and proofs. This leads my choice of analysis at the university."

"No, once my choice was done, I was able to go on myself."

"This crochet process...the algorithm is simple enough. You sit and move your fingers and something magical happens – the memories really do begin to stir. Just like dreams – it all comes together."

"There are always gaps in our knowledge, and some things will always remain unknown."

"That motivated me to do well in school so that I could get a scholarship and go to college. I had a great support system and many mentors along the way who kept me motivated."

"It’s always refreshing to hear how my work is now being used outside of the government and I am still amazed by the technological advancements navigation has made since the GPS Project began in 1973."

"It never gets too old. I am just so pleased that I was able to make a contribution. When I was working, I never imagined that the GPS would be used in the civilian world. I love seeing all the ways that it can be used and I probably have no idea how vastly used it is."

"It has history to discover, outlets for shopping, good food and a quiet atmosphere."

"I aspired to do something outside of farm work and I knew that having a good education would be the key."

"I didn't see many female professors as an undergraduate in mathematics, and had just one female professor. It has been a passion of mine to encourage women to go into mathematics."

"I felt racism as a student at Yale. It was not a positive experience. I didn't feel I belonged and I think the professors there gave more time and attention to the white students."

"“Mathematics can help to solve some of the major problems of our times.”"

"As a mathematician, your work consists of building a knowledge base, almost like building a house of bricks,each layer of bricks you lay has a solid foundation underneath it with no holes, gaps, or errors."

"Because I had to choose some teaching subjects, I chose mathematics."

"On two different occasions recently, (male) mathematicians asked me in all innocence: But you surely never suffered any discrimination?"

"... Gelfand amazed me by talking of mathematics as if it were poetry. He tried to explain to me what von Neumann had been trying to do and what the ideas were behind his work. That was a revelation for me — that one could talk about mathematics that way. It is not just some abstract and beautiful construction but is driven by the attempt to understand certain basic phenomena that one tries to capture in some idea or theory. If you can’t quite express it one way, you try another. If that doesn’t quite work, you try to get further by some completely different approach. There is a whole undercurrent of ideas and questions."

"Over the past 15 years symplectic geometry has developed its own identity, and can now stand alongside traditional Riemannian geometry as a rich and meaningful part of mathematics. The basic definitions are very natural from a mathematical point of view: one studies the geometry of a skew-symmetric bilinear form ω rather than a symmetric one. However, this seemingly innocent change of symmetry has radical effects. For example, one dimensional measurements vanish since ω(v, v) = −ω(v, v) by skew-symmetry. ... The theory has two faces. There are two kinds of geometric subobjects in a symplectic manifolds, hypersurfaces and Lagrangian submanifolds that appear in dynamical constructions, and even-dimensional symplectic submanifolds that are closely related to Riemannian and complex geometry. As we shall see, the analog of a geodesic in a symplectic manifold is a two-dimensional surface called a ."

"Symplectic geometry is the geometry of a closed skew-symmetric form. It turns out to be very different from the with which we are familiar. One important difference is that, although all its concepts are initially expressed in the smooth category (for example, in terms of differential forms), in some intrinsic way they do not involve derivatives. Thus symplectic geometry is essentially topological in nature. Indeed, one often talks about symplectic topology. Another important feature is that it is a 2-dimensional geometry that measures the area of complex curves instead of the length of real curves."

"The past few years have seen several exciting developments in the field of symplectic geometry, and a beginning has been made towards solving many important and hitherto inaccessible problems. The new techniques which have made this possible have come both from the calculus of variations and from the theory of elliptic partial differential operators. This paper describes some of the results that obtained using elliptic methods, and then shows how applied these elliptic techniques to develop a new approach to , which has important applications in the theory of 3- and 4-manifolds as well as in symplectic geometry."

"Was I ever discriminated against? There are two kinds of discrimination: explicit and implicit. For the most part, explicit discrimination did not affect me much. However, in retrospect, implicit discrimination—for example, the fact that I was so isolated as a postdoc because I could not share in college life—as well as my own internalized misogyny, did have a significant effect, though I hardly noticed this at the time. Another important factor, and one that I was aware of, was pervasive but not overt: it was very rare that women became professional scientists in Britain at the time, largely because science (and particularly “hard” as opposed to “life” science) was considered such a very unfeminine thing to do. ... These days, when most of the obvious barriers to women’s participation in mathematics have been removed, there still remain very strong and insidious internal barriers, shown in such phenomena as stereotype threat or imposter syndrome. The prejudices that lead to people accepting as completely normal that women should not get degrees at Cambridge (they first could get Cambridge degrees in 1948) are very strong and do not disappear immediately when the external barrier is removed. ... In the 1960s there were, of course, very visible manifestations of the idea that academic life is not for women. At the time, most Ivy League universities in the States did not admit women, and in Britain almost all the colleges at the most prestigious universities (Oxford and Cambridge) were single sex."

"The notion of Algebraic Complete Integrability (ACI) of certain mechanical systems, introduced the early 1980s, has given great impetus to the study of moduli spaces of holomorphic vector bundles over an algebraic curve (or a higher-dimensional variety, still at a much less developed stage). Several notions of 'duality' have been the object of much interest in both theories. There is one example, however, that appears to be a beautiful isolated feature of genus-2 curves. In this note such example, which belongs to a 'universal' class of ACIs, namely (generalized) s, is interpreted in the setting of the classical geometry of Klein's quadratic complex, following the Newstead and Narasimhan-Ramanan programme of studying moduli spaces through projective models."

"... As a mathematician coming of age in the early years when women were underrepresented, namely the 1970s, I received informal mentoring in the form of experiential advice from rare encounters with females who had achieved professional recognition; their words of wisdom were substantive resources that allowed me to persevere. I am inspired by the book Every Other Thursday (Daniell 2006) which tells the story of a group of professional women, including scientists, university professors, and administrators, who met twice a month for twenty-five years, establishing specific practices such as goal setting, networking, and checking on each other's progress. I am inspired to see more intentional examples of mentoring taking panel for women and girls interested in the ."

"The nature of s comes down to a differential equation and a duality. The interplay between the two variables is still something of a mystery (to this writer). By virtue of the lattice of periods, the theta function is at the same time one of the most powerful objects of algebraic geometry. Much classical mathematics of curve theory (Riemann surfaces) is derived using this algebraic aspect. The key idea is to interpret the moduli space of line bundles over the curve as a principally polarized abelian variety. Exploitng its self-dual property provides two variables whose duality establishes a linearization of the class of non-linear s that have as a prototype."