My conversation with Sarah starts with the connections between mathematics and literature, including references to Shakespeare, Herman Melville, George Eliot, Lewis Carroll, Douglas Adams, and more. Good writing has structure, and structure can be understood in mathematical terms. Sarah explains how mathematics can greatly enrich one’s enjoyment of literature, and how mathematics can be used to obfuscate rather than clarify. In some ways, being a female mathematician today is different - and in other ways similar! - as in the 19th century.
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Once Upon a Prime is still on my reading pile, but l'm glad that l had read all the other books mentioned in this episode before watching! I'm looking forward to reading it, and seeing if chiasmus is addressed...
ReplyDeleteI have no use for one-trick ponies who can't do higher math and write well, at the same time, and neither do The Machines, which (who?) already have everyone ranked and sorted... CP Snow's revenge!
Ah yes, misogyny in mathematics! Perhaps if the narrow, weird-in-a-bad-way STEM-types were readers, they would have heard of Shakespeare's Sister, and learned that the authors of the (one) paper to which Larry Summers referred when he talked about the supposed greater numbers of male intellectual outliers, disputed that it concluded anything of the kind? And surely all the men at the top of academia would be willing to put their money where their mouths are by taking IQ tests and comparing the results against those of all the women they've elbowed out to get to where they are? Testing the outlier theory is both trivial in principle and tractable in practice, so why not do so? Or are universities still bathouses?
And ladies, quit doing the same thing to female mathematicians who happen to be Glamazons what male mathematicians do to you in general! Yes, some of us are so smart that we don't need to spend all of our time grinding away, leaving plenty of time for self-care and to do our hair, makeup and nails, so suck it if we make you feel like bag ladies by virtue of existing, mathematical mean girls!!! And childcare isn't enough to close any gender gaps unless it's universal and free, to make up for the fact that men can still count on some woman to look after their kids for free whereas women cannot...