Who would have thought legendary baseball player Jackie Robinson would inspire a talented young woman to pursue a career in maths?
Prominent mathematician Moon Duchin, profiled yesterday in the Scientific American in a ‘where-are-they-now’ feature, reveals what inspired her to study maths.
“I wanted to be a mathematician since I was 7,” she says. She was fascinated at the time by a book on Jackie Robinson breaking the color line in baseball, and so “I wanted to blaze a trail as a woman in math—once I decided I probably couldn’t be a baseball player,”
 [Top Mathematician Moon Duchin, inspired to excel in maths by Jackie Robinson]
Baseball’s loss was clearly maths’ gain, as Moon went on to excel in her subject, taking it to Harvard University and the University of California, via the University of Chicago to complete a PhD thesis with the title (deep breath): ”Geodesics track random walks in Teichmüller space.” (Try saying that after a long day, let alone understanding the maths behind random walks in Teichmüller space…)
Duchin’s love of maths has run hand in hand with an interest in the culture and philosophy of science, coloured by her sex. Your man on the Clapham Omnibus would have a decent chance at naming a famous male mathematician, but he’d be completely stumped if you asked for a famous woman mathematician.
(If our proverbial man wanted the hat trick – female, maths-whizz, and British – he could go no further than Ada Lovelace, child of Lord Byron, and now famous for writing the first ever software program – in the 1840s!)
Moon Duchin wondered if the idea of great “Men of Mathematics” wasn’t both a misdescription of the people doing maths and a barrier to women mathematicians:
[This idea] “started to seem like it was obscuring some of the important community aspects of mathematics, and like it was controlling who would even think to enter the field”
Duchin is soon to begin working at the University of Michigan, where she hopes to teach and research her dual interests in maths and the humanities.Â
If she delves deeper into genius and gender and how they inform our ideas about mathematicians, she may go some way towards explaining our attitudes to women in science and challenging the assumptions that stop some of our brightest and best from entering that ‘purest’ of sciences - maths.
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