QUESTIONS AND PROBLEMS 105in school. And nearly everyone, even a very bright student, finds mathematics
difficult. Students need to be shown that a career in mathematics does not require
super intelligence. What students often imagine they must do—solve some difficult,
long-open problem—is definitely optional, not a necessary part of a mathematical
career. This task is being addressed by mathematical organizations such as the
Mathematical Association of America and the American Mathematical Society, and
by various programs supported by the Department of Education and the National
Science Foundation.
A secondary task is to root out the remaining stereotypes from professional
mathematicians themselves. The women interviewed by Henrion for her book
[1997) pointed out a number of practices within the profession that "create a
'chilly climate' for women both in academia in general and in mathematics in par-
ticular." Henrion has quite astutely pointed out that the mathematical community,
as a community, has its own set of expectations about how a person will work, and
those expectations were set by men. How those expectations may change (or may
not) as more and more women take on significant roles in the professional organi-
zations is a development that will be interesting to observe in the future. And as
the image of a set of successive obstacles that we have used above to interpret the
lives of the early women mathematicians shows, the further a woman progresses,
the higher the "hurdles" tend to be. Henrion [1997, p. xxxi) expressed the matter
somewhat differently: "[WJomen are even further from equity the farther along in
the pipeline we go." Making professional activities gender neutral is the primary
challenge for the future.
Questions and problems
4.1. In the late fourth and early fifth centuries the city of Alexandria, where Hy-
patia lived, was divided into Christian, Jewish, and pagan cultures. Is it merely a
random event that the only woman mathematician of the time in this city with a
long history of scholarship happened to come from the pagan culture?
4.2. Compare the careers of Charlotte Angas Scott and Sof'ya Kovalevskaya. In
what aspects were they similar? What significant differences were there? Were
these differences due to the continental circles in which Kovalevskaya moved com-
pared to the Anglo-American milieu of Scott's career? Or were they due to indi-
vidual differences between the two women?
4.3. Choose two women mathematicians, either from among those discussed in
this chapter or by going to a suitable website. Read brief biographical sketches
of them. Then try to match each woman with a comparable male mathematician
from the same era and country. Compare their motives for studying mathematics
if any motives are given, the kind of education they received, the journals where
they published their work, and the kind of academic positions they occupied.
4.4. How do you account for the fact that a considerable percentage (compared to
their percentage of the general population) of the women studying higher mathe-
matics in the United States during the 1930s were Roman Catholic nuns?^23
(^23) Some of these nuns produced mathematical research of high quality, for example, Sister Mary
Celine Fasenmyer (1906-1996).