According to statistics found on nsf.gov there are 10,379,172 women in undergraduate programs across the United States compared to 7,933,477 men who are enroll in undergraduate programs across the United States. Despite the much greater number of women going to college, less than a quarter of the students in undergrad engineering programs are women. Also, only about 28% of Doctoral Degree in Math and Statistics were awarded to females. There must be a reason for this. Women just aren't as mathematically inclined. FALSE!
Some of the greatest mathematicians have been women, but they just haven't gotten the same amount of attention as their male counterparts. They also faced many more challenges when it came to getting a formal education and getting work published and recognized.
One amazing female mathematician was Emmy Noether. She was a German born mathematician, who was the daughter of a Mathematics professor. Maybe the math was just in her blood, but clearly math doesn't discriminate between men and women. She received a Ph.D. in mathematics in 1907, but worked for free and without a specific title at the Mathematics Institute Erlangen for 8 years. In 1915 she proved that any differentiable symmetry of the action of a physical system has a corresponding conservation law. This later came to be known as the Noether's Theorem. She later worked under Hilbert at Gottingen University. She was only allowed to work under Hilbert as his assistant because she was a women. It wasn't until Hilbert and Einstein (yes that Einstein) stood up for her, was she allowed to lecture on her own, but she still wasn't paid for her work. She left Europe and came to the United States in 1933, because of the rise of the Nazi regime and her Jewish background. Her body of work led to developments in geometry, algebra, and topology.
Math doesn't hold any prejudices or biasses, people are the ones who hold each other back. The subject of mathematics is open for discovery. While some genders have the stereotype of being stronger in some subjects, those stereotypes should not hold people back from doing what they excel at. Those such as Noether who went against stereotypes and continued working on what they loved, proved that the subject of math is ready for whatever you want to do with it, no matter the reaction it may evoke from others.
coherent: kind of divided between history and the question of why we're in this state
ReplyDeleteconsolidated: I think the coherent idea will be answered if you make that last sentence into a paragraph and answer your own question, connecting to Noether's story as it relates for you.