2019-11-23 New Scientist

23 November 2019 | New Scientist | 31

Don’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.

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On the plus side

Catherine Chung’s new novel celebrates

female mathematicians, says Donna Lu

Book

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. ❚

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business 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. ❚