23 November 2019 | New Scientist | 31Don’t miss
Visit
Polarities: Psychology
and Politics of Being
Ecological opens at 8pm
on 29 November at MU
artspace, Eindhoven, the
Netherlands. With a focus
on the Anthropocene,
exhibitors include Bio Art
& Design Award winners.Read
Antimony, Gold, and
Jupiter’s Wolf (OUP) is
chemist Peter Wothers’s
erudite, complex, but
always enjoyably
unbuttoned account
of how the elements
acquired their names. A
charming way to convey
the history of this science.Play
Detroit: Become
Human launches for PC
this week on the Epic
Games Store. Producer
Quantic Dream has
created an ambitious
branching narrative,
where players’ decisions
determine the fate of the
entire city of Detroit.
©^ THE
ARTIST/MUART
SP
AC
EOn the plus side
Catherine Chung’s new novel celebrates
female mathematicians, says Donna LuBook
The Tenth Muse
Catherine Chung
Little, Brown“A MATHEMATICAL proof is
absolute once it has been
written and verified,” says
Katherine, the narrator of
Catherine Chung’s The Tenth
Muse. “If the internal logic of
a proof holds, it is considered
unassailable and true.”
The novel contrasts the
axioms of mathematics with
the mutability and complexities
of life, spanning the second
world war to the present. Its title
comes from the idea of a “tenth
muse”, an addition to the nine
muses of Greek mythology, one
unwilling to use her talents as
a means to amplify men.
As a child in the US in the
1950s, Katherine is intrigued by
nature and space. She annoys a
primary school teacher by doing
sums in her head with a method
used by German mathematician
Carl Friedrich Gauss. What is the
sum of the numbers 1 to 9? 45,
Katherine answers quickly, after
combining pairs of numbers to
give four sums that make 10:
1+9, 2+8, 3+7 and 4+6, then
adding the unpaired 5.As an adult mathematician,
Katherine works on the Riemann
hypothesis – proposed by
Bernhard Riemann in 1859 and
still one of the biggest unsolved
problems in pure mathematics.
The hypothesis, as Katherine
puts it, “predicts a meaningful
pattern hidden deep in the
seemingly chaotic distribution
of prime numbers”.
It also becomes inextricable
from the mystery of Katherine’s
family history, which takes her
to the University of Göttingen,
Germany, once a powerhouse
of mathematics but known later,
infamously, for its “great purge”
of Jewish researchers by the
Nazis in the 1930s.
The only woman in many
of her university maths classes
(“a skirt in a sea of pants”),
Katherine is determined to
be taken seriously. Here, the
novel is most trenchant, in
railing against the sexism for
so long ingrained in academia.
“If you were a man, you’d have
a brilliant future ahead of you,”
says one professor.
There is no dearth of
short-changed women in
history. The Tenth Muse is
keenly aware of how easily
the past can be rewritten,
how achievements and lives
can be subtracted. ❚PHOCAIAIMAGE
/ROBE
RT
DALY/GE
TT
Y^ I
MAGESbusiness people – often white men.
But research looking at risk-taking
in the context of dangerous or
antisocial behaviours is more
likely to feature poor, low-status
and more ethnically diverse
people. It is also foolish to
generalise as different people will
take different risks in a lab task.
Some researchers have used
differences in testosterone levels to
argue that black men in the US are
less invested fathers. Nonsense, of
course. In fact, a report by the US
Centers for Disease Control found
that black fathers tend to be more
involved in their children’s play,
bathing and feeding than white
and Hispanic fathers.
All three authors agree that
social factors such as structural
racism and sexism say much more
about why some men are more
likely to take home bigger pay
cheques or take financial risks.
Jordan-Young and Karkazis’s
Testosterone is a fascinating,
if slightly academic, read. There
are plenty of curious case studies,
and the authors make well
researched arguments directly
and elegantly.
It’s not all bad news. While both
books refer to flimsy studies, worn
stereotypes and how research can
perpetuate harmful assumptions
about maleness, they do indicate
a shift. As scientists overturn old
assumptions about testosterone
driving “male behaviours”, we can
hope to see an improvement in
the way we do research. Future
studies may reveal the hormone’s
intricate effects, with implications
for women’s health as well.
Even so, changing the public
image of testosterone is difficult.
Worldwide, there are cultural
variants of the refrain “boys will
be boys”, notes Gutmann. As we
make progress outing sexual
harassment and wage disparities,
let’s ditch this thinking, too. ❚