Celebratio Mathematica

When Mar­in Alsop con­duc­ted the Last Night of the Proms, she said that she was “quite shocked that it can be 2013 and there can still be firsts for wo­men”. The fol­low­ing year, Maryam Mirza­kh­ani be­came the first wo­man to win the Fields Medal, awar­ded to math­em­aticians un­der 40 for their con­tri­bu­tion to the sub­ject. Now, after Mirza­kh­ani’s sad death from breast can­cer at the age of 40, I am struck by the stark real­ity that in the 80 years since the award was first giv­en, there has still been only one fe­male win­ner so far.1

It is im­port­ant to note that Mirza­kh­ani was a pi­on­eer in oth­er ways too. She was the first Ir­a­ni­an Fields medal­list. Her math­em­at­ic­al re­search on the geo­metry of com­plex sur­faces was ground­break­ing, and has opened up new ho­ri­zons for oth­ers to ex­plore. When she was awar­ded the Fields Medal, Mirza­kh­ani im­me­di­ately be­came an in­spir­a­tion for many young math­em­aticians. I was de­lighted that, fi­nally, a wo­man had won this prize, the highest ac­col­ade that the math­em­at­ic­al com­munity awards. But I was also dis­mayed that it had taken so long.

For cen­tur­ies, it was so­cially un­ac­cept­able, or even im­possible, for wo­men to study math­em­at­ics at the highest levels. As a young math­em­atician, I was in­spired by the story of Soph­ie Ger­main, who taught her­self maths un­der the bed­clothes in the face of op­pos­i­tion from her par­ents. She went on to make sub­stan­tial con­tri­bu­tions to math­em­aticians’ un­der­stand­ing of one of the most fam­ous prob­lems in math­em­at­ics: Fer­mat’s Last The­or­em.

In 1890, Phil­ippa Faw­cett was the highest per­form­ing maths stu­dent at the Uni­versity of Cam­bridge. Yet wo­men were not in­cluded in the main ranked list so the hon­our of Seni­or Wran­gler (top stu­dent) went to a man, even though Faw­cett scored high­er. In the US in the 1940s, the math­em­atician Ju­lia Robin­son was not al­lowed to teach at the Uni­versity of Cali­for­nia at Berke­ley, be­cause her hus­band worked there and “nepot­ism rules” pre­ven­ted them both work­ing in the same de­part­ment. She went on to play a ma­jor role in solv­ing the tenth of Hil­bert’s fam­ous list of 23 prob­lems.

Hap­pily, things have moved on. These days, my own de­part­ment and many oth­ers are act­ively seek­ing ways to im­prove gender di­versity and in­clus­iv­ity (as well as oth­er forms of di­versity). The Athena SWAN scheme provides re­cog­ni­tion to uni­versit­ies and de­part­ments who are mak­ing ser­i­ous at­tempts in this area.

It re­quires ef­fort and act­ive en­gage­ment to change cul­ture. Pro­gress is be­ing made, al­beit slowly. The “leaky pipeline” of aca­demia (which sees wo­men drop out at every level) means that even though gender di­versity is im­prov­ing amongst math­em­at­ics un­der­gradu­ates, the bal­ance is not great among postdocs and worse still among pro­fess­ors. Re­cent data from the Lon­don Math­em­at­ic­al So­ci­ety showed that from 2014 to 2015 around 40% of UK math­em­at­ics un­der­gradu­ates were fe­male, but only 9% of UK math­em­at­ics pro­fess­ors were fe­male.

Of course the same phe­nomen­on oc­curs in many walks of life, not just aca­demia. There is lots be­ing done to try to un­der­stand why this is the case in math­em­at­ics. Re­cruit­ment prac­tices are be­ing im­proved, and aca­dem­ics are be­ing trained in un­con­scious bi­as. Per­haps a prob­lem that is dis­tinct­ive to math­em­at­ics (and closely re­lated sub­jects) is cul­tur­al. There is some­times an un­help­ful, and in my opin­ion in­cor­rect, per­cep­tion that one has to be some sort of geni­us to suc­ceed in math­em­at­ics, and this can be off-put­ting.

An­ec­dot­ally, my im­pres­sion is that there is more aware­ness now than say 15 years ago of the need to in­crease di­versity with­in math­em­at­ics at all levels of seni­or­ity. At the same time, there is a danger that this might make the gender im­bal­ance clear­er to school stu­dents who might in turn feel in­hib­ited in their de­sire to study math­em­at­ics. My per­son­al hope is for all young people to ex­per­i­ence the joys and frus­tra­tions, the cre­ativ­ity and the prac­tic­al­ity of math­em­at­ics, so that those who wish to can take their math­em­at­ic­al stud­ies fur­ther, re­gard­less of gender or any oth­er factor.

There are signs of pro­gress in im­prov­ing di­versity in math­em­at­ics (of all forms, not just gender), but it’s tak­ing a long time, and there are more firsts to come. We are still wait­ing for the first fe­male win­ner of the Abel Prize, an­oth­er ma­jor ac­col­ade in math­em­at­ics. Tra­gic­ally, Mirza­kh­ani died much too soon, but her math­em­at­ic­al con­tri­bu­tions will live on, both in the­or­ems and ideas that oth­ers can build on and also in in­spir­ing fu­ture gen­er­a­tions.

I look for­ward to the day when wo­men win­ning the Fields Medal re­ceive ac­claim for their out­stand­ing math­em­at­ic­al achieve­ment, without ref­er­ence to their gender. As Robin­son wrote:

What I really am is a math­em­atician. Rather than be­ing re­membered as the first wo­man this or that, I would prefer to be re­membered, as a math­em­atician should, simply for the the­or­ems I have proved and the prob­lems I have solved.

Vicky Neale is a White­head Lec­turer at the Math­em­at­ic­al In­sti­tute and Su­per­nu­mer­ary Fel­low at Bal­liol Col­lege, Uni­versity of Ox­ford.