Women Academics From The United States

"To anger a conservative, lie to him. To anger a liberal, tell him the truth."

"I could spend a full-time job just responding to the ridiculously illogical, inconsistent, and blatantly stupid arguments supporting Trump. But here's the thing: his supporters DON'T CARE about facts or logic. They aren't seeking truth. Trump probably could shoot someone in the middle of NYC and not lose support. And this is the cumulative reason why this nation is in such terrible shape: We don't have truth seekers; we have narcissists."

"Why should we rest our highest office in America, on a man who fundamentally goes back and forth and really cannot be trusted to be consistent or accurate in anything."

"A space has the shrinking property if, for every open cover {Va | a ∈ A}, there is an open cover {Wa | a ∈ A} with for each a ∈ A. lt is strangely difficult to find an example of a normal space without the shrinking property. It is proved here that any ∑-product of metric spaces has the shrinking property."

"Our first meeting in person took place at the IMU Congress in Nice in the summer of 1970. Together with my friend and collaborator András Hajnal we were eager to meet her, and this happened right after she arrived in Nice. Her first sentence to us was “I just proved that there is a Dowker space;” i.e., a normal space whose product with the unit interval is not normal. To appreciate the weight of this sentence, one should know that this meant she solved the most important open problem of general topology of the 1960s."

"Geometric topology was really the dominant new topological theme in the 1950's and differential topology in the 1960's. Algebraic topology did not take a back seat in either development. But something happened in the 1960's which had profound effect upon the part of topology we are concerned with. ... Paul Cohen proved that it is consistent with the usual axioms for set theory that the continuum hypothesis be false. In itself this theorem has few consequence in topology for there is very little one can do with not-CH alone. But the technique of proof, called forcing, has translations into Boolean algebra terms, into partial order terms, into terms which lead to remarkable combinatorial statements which are applicable to a wide variety of topological problems related to abstract spaces."

"Souslin's conjecture sounds simple. Anyone who understands the meaning of countable and uncountable can "work" on it. It is in fact very tricky. There are standard patterns one builds. There are standard errors in judgement one makes. And there are standard not-quite-counter-examples which almost everyone who looks at the problem happens upon. S. Tennenbaum and others have shown that that it is consistent with the axioms of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory that Souslin's conjecture be either true or false."

"I maintain that rather than the sin of pride, the transhuman advocates—much like the transgender advocates—are more likely suffering from the effects of the sin of envy. They envy those—including the God of creation—who have the power to create life and live forever on this earth. But faithful Christians know that such a quest for power like this is more demonic than divine."

"Item: Retirement party for Joanne Elliott. One of my (male) colleagues reminisced about seeing Joanne as an attractive young woman in the common room at Princeton surrounded by young men eager to be near her. The comment made me very uncomfortable, since it placed emphasis on her attractiveness in a setting where conversations are often mathematical. If only the men had been clustered around her because they were eager to hear her theorems and conjectures! But at least as the story was related, that was not the case."

"Grain boundaries and surfaces of crystalline materials have a surface free energy which in general depends on the normal direction of the interface relative to the crystal lattice(s). Determining the surface energy minimizing configurations of such interfaces, for a given surface free energy function, is an interesting mathematical problem; it reduces in the case of isotropic (i.e. constant) surface energy to the minimal surface problem. A first step is to classify minimizing cones, since they can arise as tangent cones to minimizing or asymptotically minimizing surfaces. In the isotropic case for two-dimensional surfaces in R^3, the only minimizing cones are planes. For anisotropic surface energy functions, we give here a catalog of 12 types of embedded minimizing cones, and prove that it is a complete catalog among embedded minimizing crystalline cones ..."

"The subject of motion by crystalline curvature is of interest for three quite distinct reasons. One is that some physical surface energies and physical models of crystal growth simply do give rise to such motion. Another is its use as a way to approximate motion of curves by curvature, both for computation and possibly for proving theorems. The third is that this motion simply is interesting and beautiful in its own right, having results that sometimes parallel those for ordinary curvature and sometimes are strikingly different."

"A surface free energy function is defined to be crystalline if its Wulff shape (the equilibrium crystal shape) is a polyhedron. All the questions that one considers for the area functional, where the surface free energy per unit area is 1 for all normal directions, can be considered for crystalline surface free energies. Such questions are interesting for both mathematical and physical reasons. Methods from the geometric calculus of variations are useful for studying a number of such questions; a survey of some of the results is given."

"The purpose of this paper is to construct (without using any set theoretic conditions beyond the axiom of choice) a normal Hausforff space X whose Cartesian product with the closed unit interval I is not normal. Such a space is often called a Dowker space. The question of the existence of such a space is an old and natural one ..."

"Surface tension is commonly thought of as a fluid phenomenon; the mere mention of the term brings to mind bugs skimming over water, liquids rising or falling in capillary tubes—and soap films and soap bubbles. But there is in fact a notion of surface tension (which is surface energy per unit surface area) for the interface between any two substances, or even between one substance and a vacuum. This surface energy arises from the fact that atoms (or molecules, or ions) of a given substance have a different environment at the interface between that substance and another than those in the bulk of the substance. (Sometimes even the composition of the surface is different from the bulk; this occurs for instance in soapy water having an interface with air.)"

"I gravitate toward language that radiates a certain energy for me."

"I try to distance myself from systems of literary production and strains of thought that place primacy on publishing and publishing quickly. Ironically, one way to keep myself going is to surrender completely to the fear that I won’t write again, and try to access some recessed zone where any need or ambition to write poems, or to write for others’ eyes, falls away. Once I’ve been emptied of those needs, I find I can allow myself to be filled once more. Reading invigorating work, putting myself in the presence of formidable voices and minds, or submerging myself in slow films usually helps, too."

"I’m interested in teasing out the moral complications in travel, but I’m not claiming any moral authority on the subject. Traveling, and the estrangement that comes with it — both physical and mental — can be deeply meaningful in many regards. That’s certainly been true for me. Being unsettled and departing from the familiar encourages a certain kind of attention and awakening of curiosity that helps us reach outside of our own skins, and in doing so, makes us consider not only what is unfamiliar to us in our surroundings, but what is unfamiliar to us in ourselves."

"Reading is migratory, an act of transport, from one life to another, one mind to another. Just like geographic travel, reading involves estrangement that comes with the process of dislocating from a familiar context. I gather energy from this kind of movement, this estranging and unsettling, and I welcome it precisely because it’s conducive to examination, interrogation, reordering. Travel, imaginative or physical, can sharpen perception and force a measuring of distance and difference."

"Speaking and writing in English carried with it the anxiety of being betrayed by one’s usage mistakes and lack of fluency; this was no doubt reinforced by the linking of academic success to facility with speech and writing. At the same time that I began learning English, my Mandarin slowed in development, because I wasn’t using it outside of the domestic sphere. To this day, even though I enrolled in a year of intensive Mandarin study in college, my Mandarin is quite stunted. I’ve lost most of the ability to read and write in it, sadly."

"I consider myself a Buddhist practitioner, but still a beginner, even though I’ve been meditating on and off for many years now. When I was growing up, no one in my household was religious. I’d always been curious about religion, probably because it was bound up for me with questions about how to live as a person when you’re granted such a brief stretch of time. I remember picking up a Buddhist book during my senior year of high school, when it was dawning on me that I would soon experience a new level of autonomy."

"My initial impulse is to say that the poems aren’t “about” me, but that response plays into the faulty assumption that poems whose primary aim might be self-disclosure or testimony are somehow less aesthetically rigorous or energizing. I don’t buy that, really. At the same time, the “I” in these poems, while they might share autobiographical details with the person that wrote them, aren’t “about” me insofar as the speakers are fashioned, dramatized, contextually bound. I invoke them and write into them to better serve the poems and their modes, registers, and textures. Many of the poems take up self-interrogation, but I’m not interested in getting the plot details exactly right. The self is a fiction."

"Buddhist philosophy made so much sense to me when I encountered it. It also upended so much of my thinking — about the self, about suffering, about the mental barriers I’d drawn up my whole life. I can’t understate the freedom that comes — at any age, but especially at that young age — with understanding there is no need to chase after anything, that one innately contains a vast understanding and wisdom. The freedom and balm of knowing that the root of so much suffering is also an illusion: You are not separate from any other thing."

"And I continued to struggle with the Tenth Problem. In 1961 Martin Davis, Hilary Putnam, and I published a joint paper, "The undecidability of exponential diophantine equations," which used ideas from the papers Martin and I had presented at the International Congress along with various new results. The paper contains what is sometimes referred to as the Robinson hypothesis (or, as Martin calls it, "J.R.") to the effect that if there were some diophantine relation that grew faster than an exponential but not too terribly fast—less than some function could be expressed in exponentials—then we would be able to define exponentiation. It would follow from the definition that exponential diophantine equations would be equivalent to diophantine equations and that, therefore, the solution to Hilbert's tenth problem would be negative. At the time many people told Martin that this approach was misguided, to say the least. They were more polite to me."

"We say a mathematical theory is decidable if there is an effective method of determining the validity of each statement of the theory. If there is no such method, the theory is undecidable. It is clear that if there is a mechanical way of transforming each statement of an undecidable theory into an equivalent statement of another theory, the second theory is also undecidable. This principle, together with the fact that the arithmetic of natural numbers is undecidable, enables us to solve the decision problem for fields of finite degree over the rationals."

"Notices: Can you tell me your memories of Julia Robinson, what she was like as a person? Davis: Very nice, very straightforward. Broad in her interests, mathematical and otherwise. And great power—there is no question in my mind that she was a much more powerful mathematician than I. We worked together on a problem on which we didn’t get anywhere. We were trying to prove the unsolvability of the decision problem for word equations. It turned out that we wouldn’t have been able to do that because the problem is solvable. Makanin solved it positively."

"In this paper, we shall show the validity of an iterative procedure suggested by George W. Brown ... This method corresponds to each player choosing in turn the best pure strategy against the accumulated mixed strategy of his opponent up to then."

"In Julia Robinson we find a mathematician who was a heroine in her own time and a role model for all time. It is a story of childhood, illness, love, marriage, disappointment, obsession, and triumph."

"Desires that are congruent with the law of the master are interpellated by the enslaved, remembered, and passed on to the generations as their own."

"What does it mean to occupy and to speak from this position of shame (the position from which one cannot “still turn round to and say, ‘At least I am not a ______’”) without being shamed?"

"Subjectivities constituted from transatlantic slavery onward ... connected, then as now, by the everyday mundane horrors that aren't acknowledged to be horrors, ... inhabited horrors, ... that are breathed in like air and often unacknowledged to be monstrous."

"My intent is to examine and account for a series of repetitions of master narratives of violence and forced submission that are read or reinscribed as consent and affection."

"We live in a nation that does everything to induce our rage while simultaneously doing everything to deny that we have a right to feel it. American democracy is as much a project of suppressing Black rage as it is of leigimizing and elevating white rage. American democracy uses calls for civility, equality, liberty and justice as smoke screens to obscure all the ways in which Black folks are treated uncivilly, unequally, illiberally, and unjustly as a matter of course."

"The emergence of the "post-" links both transnationalism and intersectionality to a kind of past tense. ... If the past tense of these terms is, in part, secured by "newer" work that challenges the hegemony of these terms, it is also secured through the fantasies of "political completion" that have swirled around the terms. ... The impossibility that any analytic can perform or produce "political completion" means that both intersectionality and transnationalism have been bemoaned and criticized for what they cannot ever accomplish. ... Because both analytics have been posited as correctives, both are imagined as exhaustible or finite. ... This conception of these analytics is at odds with the analytics themselves, both of which call for ongoing feminist engagements with questions of power, dominance, and subordination."

"Treating Black feminism as primarily an anti-racist intervention within feminism continues to render it as a disruptive and temporary event, to be addressed, responded to, and moved on from, back to the regularly scheduled course of things."

"Women’s studies has long constructed black feminism as a form of discipline inflicted on the field and has imagined black feminists as a set of disciplinarians who quite literally whip the field into shape with their demands for a feminism that accounts for race generally, and for black women specifically. Of course, in an account where black women’s primary labor is to remedy—and perhaps even to save—the field from itself, ... once the field has effectively reconfigured itself, black feminism is imagined as no longer necessary or vital. Nowhere has this simplistic construction unfolded more visibly than in the context of intersectionality."

"The continued blindness to black feminism as an autonomous intellectual and political tradition that has ... done far more than ask to be “accounted for” and included in feminist theory is what enables women’s studies to continue representing black feminist theory as merely a critique."

"Diana’s powerful analysis of the complex human interaction of the writers never stays merely abstract, but is infused with a very thorough knowledge of what can be discovered of the group and its often eccentric members."

"Possession of various emotions and desires—care, concern, love, but also anger, revulsion, indignation—is not just immensely useful to seeing the moral landscape, it is a necessary condition of doing so. The idea of dispassion as the paradigmatic epistemic stance seems to me a dangerous one, for there are some truths, I want to argue, that can be apprehended only from a stance of affective engagement. The claim is an important one, for, if correct, it means we must reject the “bureaucratic model” of morality that is implicit in so many ethical theories."

"The first lesson about affect’s role in moral epistemology, then, is that from the valorized position of dispassionate detachment we are often actually less likely to pick up on what is morally salient. Emotional distance does not always clarify; disengagement is not always the most revealing stance. To see clearly what is before us, we need to cultivate certain desires, such as the desire to see justice done, and the desire to see humans flourish, but we must also, more particularly, work at developing our capacities for loving and caring about people."

"We are curious, we ask questions, we read and research and connect with others who know more than we do. Then we fumble to record the answers the best we can, and we discover that we understand things better because we try to write about them with candor and clarity. Questions just keep bubbling up all the time."

"If I am fortunate enough to be confirmed, we will turn the page on hate and close the door on discrimination by enforcing our federal civil rights laws."

"Martin lavished praise on Kristen M. Clarke '97, the BSA president, who, he said, had courageously invited him "in the face of enormous pressure from the forces of reaction." It is young people like Kristen, Martin said, who are the hope and future of the African-American community."

"Please use the following theories and observations to assist you in your search for truth regarding the genetic differences between Blacks and whites: One: Dr Richard King reveals that the core of the human brain is the 'locus coeruleus,' which is a structure that is Black, because it contains large amounts of neuro-melanin, which is essential for its operation. Two: Black infants sit, crawl and walk sooner than whites. Three: Carol Barnes notes that human mental processes are controlled by melanin -- that same chemical which gives Blacks their superior physical and mental abilities. Four: Some scientists have revealed that most whites are unable to produce melanin because their pineal glands are often calcified or non-functioning. Pineal calcification rates with Africans are five to 15 percent, Asians 15 to 25 percent and Europeans 60 to 80 percent. This is the chemical basis for the cultural differences between blacks and whites. Five: Melanin endows Blacks with greater mental, physical and spiritual abilities -- something which cannot be measured based on Eurocentric standards."

"Professor Martin is an intelligent, well-versed Black intellectual who bases his information on indisputable fact"

"a core part of my social experience on campus .. opportunity for students who were in search of that kind of support network and system on campus at that time"

"If we stay on this line, we will map every large galaxy in the observable universe by 2060. Think about that. Think about it: we've gone from arranging clamshells to general relativity to SDSS in a few thousand years -- and if we hang on 40 more, we can map all the galaxies. But we have to stay on the line. Will that be our choice? There are dark forces in this world that will rob our entire species of our right to understand our universe. Don't be afraid of the dark. Fight back. Join us."

"What we need to think about perhaps for Mission Blue is increasing the biologging capacity. How is it that we can actually take this type of activity elsewhere? And then finally -- to basically get the message home -- maybe use live links from animals such as blue whales and white sharks. Make killer apps, if you will. A lot of people are excited when sharks actually went under the Golden Gate Bridge. Let's connect the public to this activity right on their iPhone. That way we do away with a few internet myths. So we can save the bluefin tuna. We can save the white shark. We have the science and technology. Hope is here. Yes we can. We need just to apply this capacity further in the oceans."

"… I still think of that 8-year-old girl who loved sitting on the floor of her library, reading about animals and plants. How excited I was to read new nature books. Every time, turn to the back cover, and it was always a White guy. I never saw someone like me. I might have started thinking, maybe outdoors is not for me [if it wasn’t for] my parents, who showed me what it means to have a garden and how much fun it was to memorize the constellations. So it was weird, because I was internalizing what I saw as a lover of pop culture, but what my parents modeled was different…"

"…It was very purposeful that I included animals that I’ve never touched, never looked into their eyes. We should be able to care for creatures outside of [our immediate vicinity]. We should be able to care about plants and animals and people that we’ve never seen before."

"I love the poet Kwame Dawes, and I always come back to this quote of his: “We are political by our noise and by our silence.” What we choose to be excited about is political. For the longest time, I’d kind of cringe, thinking I’m not bold enough to be political. His words really helped me own the power of my own enthusiasm. Think of how many things weren’t championed by the publishing world in the ’80s and ’90s. Think of how many things weren’t even encouraged. It’s not that there weren’t Asian Americans writing literature or writing about nature. The publishing houses chose not to publish them. That’s a political statement, too….So for anybody who says, Oh, I don’t want to get too political here—we’re all political. You’re political by what you champion and what you stay quiet about."