FROM THE ARCHIVES: sleepwalking through herstory

NOTE: Galleys are finally finished! And now I am off to New York City for a few days to take in Book Expo America and also see Lisa Randall at the New York Academy of Sciences, chatting with Alan Alda about pop-up particle physics. So here's another tasty blast from the past with a math-y tie-in in honor of the forthcoming The Calculus Diaries: a lightning tour of a couple of notable women of mathematics. It's also timely because it mentions x-ray analysis of the Archimedes palimpset and Floyd Landis and his steroid scandal, both of which have been in the news again recently. Enjoy! Original posting will be back very soon, we promise.

It's official: Floyd Landis is a testosterone-pumping fiend, if the results of his "B" test are to be believed. He stands to become the first winner of the Tour de France to be stripped of his title because of doping allegations -- not quite the footnote to athletic history he was hoping to achieve. Landis still denies it vociferously, though, and vows to prove his innocence. We would like to believe him, we really would. But our skepticism is mounting. Not only were there traces of synthetic testosterone in his blood, but the tests revealed a whopping 11 to 1 ratio of testosterone to epitestosterone. For comparison purposes, the maximum allowed ratio by the World Anti-Doping Agency is a trifling 4 to 1. It's not looking too good for Floyd.

Second, we cannot believe we completely missed Friday's live Webcast -- courtesy of the San Francisco Exploratorium (which still has our vote for coolest science museum ever) -- of the last bit of deciphering via synchrotron radiation of that classic text by Archimedes, which we mentioned in passing in a prior post. There is little excuse for our lapse. Wired.com tried to tell us. Yet somehow, the news eluded us until it was too late. How embarrassing. But if Landis can still make excuses, so can we. I hereby blame Bloglines, which occasionally suffers unconscionable delays in posting feed updates.

Still, missing a Webcast by a few measly hours isn't nearly so bad as not hearing about a world-class female mathematician for over 100 years. Last week, in response to the question of hip scientific names to drop for aspiring geeks, someone mentioned one Sonya Kovalevsky, a Russian woman who was a protege of the Swedish mathematician Gosta Mittag-Leffler, founder of the journal Acta Mathematica. Once again, we were caught napping. I'd never heard of Kovalevsky, and since I'm a firm believer in the importance of ferreting out long-forgotten women in science and math throughout history (my own little way of disseminating "herstory," if you will), I Googled her over the weekend. She was, indeed, a fascinating, admirable woman, whose story certainly doesn't deserve to be gathering dust in the faded archives of scientific history.

It wasn't hard to uncover the bare basics of Sonya's life; we got all kinds of hits, with everyone pretty much relating the same laundry list of accomplishments: first woman member of the Russian Academy of Sciences (although still unable to attend actual meetings); first modern European woman to attain a full professorship; established the first significant result in the general theory of partial differential equations; and winner of the prestigious Prix Bordin. She was also a gifted writer (of both novels and magazine articles), and often quoted thusly: "Many who have never had occasion to learn what mathematics is confuse it with arithmetic, and consider it a dry and arid science. In reality, however, it is the science which demands the utmost imagination.... It seems to me that the poet must see what others do not see, must look deeper than others look. And the mathematician must do the same thing."

(Lengthy side note: The question of how to refer to women scientists is a thorny one -- by first name? last name? married name? But after spending so much time with Ms. Kovalevsky this weekend, we feel like we know her well enough to be on a first-name basis. Besides, it's exhausting to have to keep spell-checking "Kovalevsky." Plus, she is sometimes referenced as Sofia Kovaleskaya, because no self-respecting 19th century person of Russian descent would have any fewer than three forms of their name, including nicknames. It's all very confusing. So henceforth, she shall be Sonya.)

I wasn't surprised to learn that Sonya was a product of Russia's privileged class, the daughter of a military officer and landowner; her mother was the granddaughter of a Russian astronomer. Education was such a taboo for women, even in the mid-19th century, that only those women who moved in rarefied aristocratic circles were exposed to intellectual pursuits . "All my life I have been unable to decide for which I had the greater inclination, mathematics or literature," Sonya wrote in her autobiography, recognizing that because of her educational opportunities, she'd had a choice. Not that those opportunities were especially stellar: like most early women in math and science, she was doggedly persistent about vaulting over the many obstacles "Society" sought to erect in her path.

Sonya's interest in math was sparked by an eccentric uncle, who taught her chess and discussed all kinds of abstract concepts with her: "squaring the circle, asymptotes, and other things that were unintelligible to me and yet seemed mysterious and at the same time deeply attractive." When her room was redecorated at age 11, there wasn't enough wallpaper to complete the project, so one wall was temporarily papered with her father's old calculus lecture notes from college. Initially the symbols were little more than hieroglyphics to her, but after reflecting on them night after night, she began making connections between the symbols and the concepts she discussed with her uncle. Another 19th century mathematician, Mary Somerville, had a similar breakthrough around the same age: she stumbled upon algebraic symbols while perusing a puzzle in a magazine, also igniting a lifelong thirst to know more. And like Somerville, Sonya's father eventually grew dismayed at his daughter's "unfeminine" interests and tried to put a stop to them. ("We shall have young Mary in a straitjacket one of these days," Somerville's father supposedly lamented.)

Somerville continued to study by candlelight, and when her father confiscated her candles, she memorized texts during the day and worked out problems in her head at night.  The family of French mathematician Sophie Germain -- inventor of "Germain primes," i.e., double a Germain prime and add 1 to get another prime number -- used a similar tactic to dissuade their equally precocious daughter from studying geometry, algebra and calculus... to no avail. Sonya also studied under the covers at night, borrowing an algebra textbook from one of her tutors.

Then a neighbor, who taught science, gave the family a copy of a basic physics book he'd written. Sonya turned to the section on optics, and discovered trigonometry. Even though she'd never encountered it before, she managed to make sense of the derivations for small angles by substituting "a chord for the mysterious sine." In short, she independently rediscovered the same method by which the whole concept of a sine had been developed historically. Impressed, the neighbor convinced Sonya's father to let her study analytic geometry and calculus privately in St. Petersburg. She mastered both subjects in a single winter. Her astonished tutor noted that it was almost as if she'd known the concepts in advance.

Someone with such a formidable innate aptitude couldn't be satisfied for long with simple calculus, but Sonya's opportunities for further study were severely limited because of her gender. She entered into a marriage of convenience with a young paleontologist named Vladimir Kovalevsky, and the couple moved to Heidelberg, Germany. She still couldn't formally enroll in a university, but she managed to get permission to "unofficially" attend lectures by some of the foremost scientists in Europe. In that respect, she fared a bit better initially than Germain, who was forced at one point to impersonate a male student who had passed away in order to study with Joseph LaGrange (via correspondence) at L'Ecole Polytechnique in Paris. But in both cases, the women performed so spectacularly that they won the admiration and mentorship of prominent men: LaGrange and later Carl Friedrich Gauss, in German's case, and Karl Weierstrass (and, later, Mittag-Leffler) in Sonya's case.

Weierstrass wasn't a familiar name to me, but at the time he was the most renowned German mathematician, a professor at the University of Berlin. Sonya came to him bearing glowing recommendations from her Heidelberg professors, yet even then, he was skeptical, and far from enthusiastic about taking her on. To discourage the young woman, he gave her a set of problems he'd prepared for his most advanced students, assuming she'd never make sense of them. Instead, she solved them in record time; not only that, her solutions were clear and original, demonstrating a grasp of the material lacking in most of his male students (Mittag-Leffler being one notable exception). So he agreed to teach her privately, and came to consider her among the most brilliant and promising of all his students.

Sonya didn't disappoint her mentor. By the age of 25, she had produced three original papers, each of which was deemed worthy of a PhD degree: one on the shape of Saturn's rings, another on elliptical integrals, and a third on partial differential equations. Not that Berlin would ever award a woman a PhD, especially one that had never been officially matriculated. Anywhere. (And how could she possibly matriculate when they wouldn't allow it? Yes. Exactly.) To his credit, Weierstrass fought for her, eventually convincing the University of Gottingen to award her a PhD in mathematics, summa cum laude.

I would like to tell you this story has a happy ending, or at least that Sonya's intellectual struggles ended with her PhD. Alas, such is not quite the case. She and Vladimir returned to Russia, where she found she could only get a job teaching basic arithmetic at a girl's elementary school. The irony wasn't lost on her: "I was, unfortunately, weak in the multiplication tables," she acidly observed in her memoirs. Instead, she began reviewing theater performances and writing articles about science and technology for a local newspaper (huzzah! a fellow science writer!), as well as starting a novel. And her platonic marriage mysteriously turned non-platonic: she gave birth to a daughter during this period, too.  That didn't make the marriage a happy one. Eventually she left Vladimir and moved first to France, and then Stockholm, when the university there offered her a probationary position, thanks to the urging of Mittag-Leffler. By then, she was a widow: Vladimir had committed suicide, distraught and depressed over his many failed business ventures, among other things.

Sonya, in contrast, proved so popular with her students that she was given a five-year professorship at Stockholm, and also became an editor of Acta Mathematica. In 1888, she reached the pinnacle of her career when she won the French Academy of Sciences' prestigious Prix Bordin for her treatise, On the Problem of the Rotation of a Solid Body About a Fixed Point. They might have excluded her from the competition on the basis of gender -- the French Academy was far from welcoming, as Sophie Germain could attest -- but the papers were all submitted anonymously and the judges weren't aware they'd selected a woman until it was, as it were, "too late." Still, so impressed were they by her work that they actually doubled the prize. It seems too cruel a twist of fate that, only three years later, she succumbed to pneumonia following an influenza epidemic.

By now we hope you're convinced that Sonya deserves wider repute. Apparently the novelist Thomas Pynchon thinks so, too. His much-heralded forthcoming new book, Against the Day, is rumored to feature cameo appearances not just by Nikola Tesla, Bela Lugosi, and Groucho Marx, but also to "trace the life and loves of Sofia Kovalevskaya," per Wikipedia (which we know is never wrong). True, Sonya (or Sofia, if you prefer) died in 1891, and the book's events purportedly take place between the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and the aftermath of World War I, but novelists have been known to take liberties with chronology, and for Pynchon, time has always been a somewhat fluid quantity. Maybe she's featured post-humously.

Still, bare facts can only tell us so much; the nuances of Sonya's life and work, the complex layers of the living, breathing woman, eluded me in my weekend research. That's probably because the definitive biography of Sonya Kovalevsky remains to be written. Fortunately, the same cannot be said of Ada Lovelace (tempestuous daughter of the poet Lord Byron), brought into vivid focus in Benjamin Woolley's The Bride of Science, or of the incomparable Emilie du Chatelet, who is celebrated in David Bodanis' new book, Passionate Minds. We have already pre-ordered the US version of this book on Amazon, and encourage our readers to do the same, since if nothing else, it proves to be a torridly rollicking good read. It also boasts the longest subtitle I've ever seen for a science book: "The Great Love Affair of the Enlightenment, Featuring the Scientist Emilie du Chatelet, the Poet Voltaire, Sword Fights, Book Burnings, Assorted Kings, Seditious Verse, and the Birth of the Modern World." Whew! Throw in a shipwreck on a deserted island, and you've got a potboiling bestseller on your hands. From our perspective (and no doubt for Bodanis as well), that's a very good thing.

Emilie (may we call her Emilie?) was another precocious child of aristocrats, this time in 18th century France. Her parents feared she would never make a good marriage, because no great lord would want a woman who "flaunts her mind and frightens away the suitors her other excesses have not driven off." I shall have to wait for Bodanis' book to be enlightened on what these other excesses might have been, but it's a matter of historical record that she had no shortage of admirers and lovers, including the duc de Richelieu and -- yes -- Voltaire.

Despite her parents' fears, her father's wealth and position ensured a "marriage of convenience" at the age of 19 to the older marquis du Chatelet. She dressed up like a man in 1733 and gate-crashed the Cafe Gradot, where all the happening intellectuals hung out. People  like Voltaire. Soon the two were shacking up in her husband's country estate, living and working in separate studies. She completed a translation of Isaac Newton's Principia there, duplicating his experiments by hanging pipes, rods and wooden balls from the rafters.

She and Voltaire remained friends even after they split (Bodanis claims Voltaire couldn't deal his lover's superior intellect). Alas, her unconventionality, while admirable, couldn't save her from that most conventional of fates: dying in childbirth. An ill-advised liaison with a young poet resulted in Emilie's pregnancy at age 41, which everyone -- including Emilie herself -- knew was pretty much a death sentence in that day and age.  Voltaire supported her during her last days, writing that "she wasn't angry, just sad to have to leave before she was ready." She died in August 1749, a few days after giving birth. (The child didn't survive either.)

It's a compelling story, and easy to see what drew Bodanis to write a book about this remarkable woman. So we were peeved (Jen-Luc Piquant was frankly outraged) to read snarky comments in the UK reviews criticizing the book for supposedly short-shrifting on the science, taking this as evidence that Emilie wasn't really all that important a figure in science history. What is this overweening need some people have to belittle the accomplishments of women scientists throughout history? Such critics completely miss the point: what makes Emilie du Chatelet and her sisters "great" is the very fact that they were able to pursue their love of math and science in defiance of social norms, public ridicule, bureaucratic red tape designed specifically to exclude them, and lord knows what else. (This is not, incidentally, meant to be read in any way as casting aspersions on their scientific achievements.)

That's not even counting the day-to-day, constant barrage of criticism, doubt and skepticism that would inevitably cause even the toughest spirit -- regardless of gender -- to question one's aptitude or worth, something that continues to plague aspiring women scientists today. The unspoken cultural prejudice about the "female mind" and its ability (or inability) to excel at math and science is so deeply ingrained that women themselves often unwittingly buy into it. Mary Somerville is a prime example of this, eventually coming to believe that women just weren't as gifted as men when it came to scientific creativity. She certainly doubted her own abilities: "I have perseverance and intelligence, but no genius," she once wrote.

Admittedly, Somerville is primarily known for popularizing scientific treatises by LaPlace and Newton, not for original research. Nonetheless, these achievements earned her election to the Royal Astronomical Society, among other honors, and when she died, London obituaries hailed her as the "queen of science." Most significantly, she never had any real educational opportunities, unlike her male counterparts. The same is true of most of the pioneering women in math and science, many of whom did make significant original contributions to research -- and often got short-shrifted when it came to recognition of those achievements. Sophie Germain never felt she received the recognition and respect she deserved. And would the French Academy have awarded Sonya Kovalevsky such a prestigious prize had it known from the outset that she was a woman? (For that matter, Jocelyn Bell was excluded from consideration for the Nobel Prize for her role in the discovery of quasars.) We will never know what these formidable women in history might have accomplished, had they been encouraged in their early years of study, had their innate talent been supported and fostered, rather than stymied and blocked at every turn.

In short, I must agree with Bodanis: "Emilie du Chatelet deserves to be brought back to life, in all her stumbling excitement and fears." The same could be said of Sonya Kovalevsky, Mary Somerville, Sophie Germain, the chemist Agnes Pockels, Hypatia, and any number of forgotten women who blazed their own bravely idiosyncratic path in a world of men to which they were rarely welcomed -- only  to disappear into a fog of obscurity once the all-too-brief flame of life was extinguished. Too many admirable women in science and math have been unjustly forgotten because we have been sleepwalking through our own "herstory." Let us make sure we remember -- and honor -- their names, and pass their stories on to the next generation, thereby inspiring both girls and boys to emulate their passion and courage.

Comments

[Mike]

I would agree, but I have it on good authority that girls have cooties.

Emilie du Chatelet does rock, though. She was portrayed rather well by Helene De Fougeroles in the Nova documentary "Einstein's Big Idea" (www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/einstein/)

[Quasar9]

Yep, I'm quite happy with the concept of his&her story, or her&his story if you prefer. I'm comfortable enough in my own skin. Thanks for high lighting these notable women in (his)story.

[Matt]

I've always been a Hypatia man, but Sonya seems like quite a chick!

[JenLucPiquant]

Hypatia rocked, big time... DarkSyde over at Daily Kos wrote a terrific bit about her a couple of weeks ago, which I might have linked to, if I could be bothered to look it up. :)

Incidentally, NOVA's "Einstein's Big Idea' was based on an earlier Bodanis book, "E=mc<2>". He stumbled across Emilie du Chatelet while researching it, and became fascinated. Quite the prolific writer, that Bodanis -- he only just finished winning the Aventis Prize for his book on electricity!

[Benny]

I am an historian of science in training, and its good to see people getting so interested in women's role in the history of science! That being said, there has been a LOT done on women in science, science and gender (my area), women and philosophy, etc though most of it is academic and hidden away in subscription only journals. But women and science is probably one of the hottest areas of research in academic history of science. As for du Chatelet, just FYI, there is an entire session on her at this years History of Science Society (Friday Nov 3, Vancouver).

Cheers

[Lee Kottner]

Why, after reading stories like this, is it still so hard for some men (like Ex-Harvard president Larry) to accept that women can be not just good or adequate, but have a true vocation for science and math? Is it because it took women of absolute genius and indomitable will to fight their way into the ranks? I suspect so.

And can I just weigh in on the first name-last name thing? Call me old school, but I still think it trivializes women to use their first names over their last. We routinely refer to male scientists by their last names (Feynman, Einstein, Darwin) because it seems disrespectful to use the more familiar personal names. Can we accord the women the same respect? It's a small thing, but indicative, I think, of the still-underlying disbelief in the seriousness of women's endeavors.

And Ms. Ouellette will now cattleprod me for being a feminazi (we're old friends, so it's okay).

[Matt]

"Why, after reading stories like this, is it still so hard for some men (like Ex-Harvard president Larry) to accept that women can be not just good or adequate, but have a true vocation for science and math?"

I must take issue with this. Larry Summers was asked to speak about why there aren't as many women in hard sciences. He was in a position to have dealt with the issue, so the question was fair.

In good faith he answered, and put forth several possibilities, one of which was that women may have innate mental facilities in the aggregate which make them less suited to math and the hard sciences.

If we expect to continue the progress toward a better understanding of the natural world, we can't make certain questions (or possible answers) unspeakable. He made it fairly clear that he didn't find it hard to believe that women could perform as well as men in the sciences, he brought forth the idea that it wasn't impossible to believe that it might be true.

My wife is smarter than I am, she's better at logical thinking, better at engineering, and generally a better, clearer thinker than I (and I am not denigrating myself, I'm a professional engineer). Does that make it impossible that along a normal distribution we could find that women cluster in a different spot than men?

Men cluster on the higher side for physical strength than women. Women cluster on the side of more robust immune systems. Men are more aggressive, women slightly more suited to childbearing. Why must we assume that we think identically?

If your answer to that last question is that there are compelling social reasons not to ask such things, then I can respect that position. There is little question that should we find the answer, it might be used to attempt to systematically reduce the options for half our population. If such a thing were to happen it would be to all our detriment immeasurably. But if we decide to take that path, let's not then pretend that we are pursuing truth.

I have no idea what the answer is, and no matter what the answer, it doesn't change the fact that individual women of genius will continue to contribute in all areas of human endeavor. Misquoting or misapprehending Larry Summers' comments does not serve the debate, however.

[Louise]

It is great that Sonya Kovalevsky's incredible talent was recognised and that she got as far as she did. Even today many women are slotted into teaching K-12. My experience is that if a woman solves a problem that her professor cannot, he will shove the solution back at her without reading it and insist that she made an error.

[JenLucPiquant]

Some really interesting comments on this post. I'm pleased to hear that the the study of women's role in the history of science is flourishing in academia, but the fact that this is largely relegated to subscription-only journals is part of the reason why only a select few know some of these women's names. It's equally important that eventually their stories move out of the Ivory Tower and into the mainstream public consciousness.

I was going to break out the cattle-prod for Lee's feminazi rant, but I forgot to recharge the batteries. :) Seriously, I understand the rationale for sticking with last-name only for women scientists, but it IS possible to be just a bit too uptight about this. If it causes confusion or impedes clear communication, then we should be willing to be flexible on this count without automatically taking offense as somehow disrespecting those women.

As for the whole Larry Summers debate -- I haven't followed it closely enough to offer an informed opinion, but I do know that Summers' troubles at Harvard didn't begin with his widely reported comments. I certainly can't pretend to know whether or not his comments were offered in "good faith." And while Matt raises a valid point, I doubt Lee is claiming that there aren't any gender differences at all between men and women -- just that these should not be used to exclude or denigrate women's abilities and contributions to the hard sciences. That these sorts of prejudices have played a major role in excluding women in the past is pretty much indisputable.

And Mike -- yes, girls have cooties. Or is that just what we WANT you to think? :)

[Lee Kottner]

Jen's right when she says I'm not insisting that gender differences don't exist. My complaint is that "different" often seems synonymous with "inferior" in many (but not exclusively) male minds. And the point Louise makes is all too true, as Kovalevsky's experience with the French Academy illustrates. (I've heard similar anecdotes from other women myself.) This is part of my problem with Larry Summers (thanks for supplying his last name; I seem to have blocked it. Can't think why.) Among all the "good faith" reasons he supplied, the active discouragement of women was not among them. It was, instead, somehow our fault: the reluctance or inability of women who have children to work 80-hour weeks (not of institutions to provide childcare); fewer girls than boys have top scores on science and math tests in late high school years (because girls have been weeded out by then); and our innate abilities (those pesky double X chromosomes!). Thus it has been throughout history, thus it will remain, world without end, Amen, unless that "innate opinion" of women is recognized and counteracted. One of the ways to do that is what's going on here: advertising the stories of intelligent women scientists to provide role models.

So, go Jen! (Even if I still think you oughta call all researchers equally by their first or last name.)

[candace]

My summer project has been to write a profile about a woman in science every week. Here are the products thus far (9 entries and counting):
http://epistolary.net/archives/cat_female_genius.html
Ironically, Sofia K was my first entry on the subject, and du Chatelet my most recent.

On the names issue, I find myself fairly consistently using first names when writing about them. This isn't to trivilise them, but I think it sounds better to me perhaps because I subconsciously think of them as metaphorical friends or sisters in arms (cheesy, I know) and also because I am just doing informal character sketches of them. If I were writing a more rigorous biography, I would probably tend more towards last names.

A good quick read about women in maths is Women and Numbers by Teri Perl.

[muz]

Not only was Sonya a precocious mathematician but she was also a very good writer. I read her childhood memoirs a couple of weeks ago and it was amazingly well-written. There is a brief mention of the wallpaper incident.

[Torbjörn Larsson]

Kudos for bringing forth women in science, it is sometimes done but still sorely needed. According to UN women owns a few percent of the Earths resources. I wouldn't want to make a Summers-style comparison until there has been a few generations with equal economic and other opportunities...

Kovalevsky's main result on PDE's are BTW clever and beautiful, IIRC. It was in a course book on DE's outside the curricula, but I took a look. The other PDE results were much messier.

[Matt]

I didn't mean to imply that we don't have work to do to remove the roadblocks women currently encounter. We are on our way, but I do not think women currently enjoy the freedoms that men do to pursue their interests in all arenas.

But do we need to remove from offices or posts those people who might propose the possibility of cognitive differences? Are we saying those inquiries are to be unspoken? I think it's important to answer that question since we are removing heads of major universities for the offense. You can point out Summers' issues prior to the Big Event, but the truth is that he left his post because of that speech and its fall-out. It's a weighty thing to tell educators and scientists that certain lines of inquiry are not to be pursued.

[Blake Stacey]

A few points, mentioned in no particular order:

1. About calling famous scientists by their last names --- the real puzzler here is how we refer to Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler. Almost everybody I know, every book I've read and every documentary I've screened use "Tycho" and "Kepler" respectively. David Goodstein in **The Mechanical Universe** says that "Brahe" is unfamiliar-sounding while "Johannes" is just too common, so we call one by his first name and the other by his last. Loony, huh? Plus, if we followed common Russian practice (say, if we were living in a Nabokov novel), we'd call Sonya by her first name and "patronymic", which I guess would be Sonya Vasilievna.

2. I met Larry Summers once, at a barbecue they threw for incoming Hahvahd freshmen. I snuck in to spy for MIT (well, actually, a good buddy from high school was enterinig Harvard that year). After shaking his hand and participating in a normal, congenial conversation --- during which he reminisced about his good times with Bill Clinton --- I felt a sudden need to wash with lots of soap. Subconscious at work! The only other thing I have to say about the women-in-science brouhaha, I already said in the Spring 2005 issue of MIT's humor magazine, **Voo Doo**. My piece was entitled, "Interfraternity Council Protests Lack of Women in Science", and you can read it on page 8 of the following:

http://web.mit.edu/voodoo/www/is_v91no1.pdf

Warning: I think I was recovering from some emotional trauma/drama while writing that. Or else I'm even more tasteless than I had formerly believed.

3. Linking to the Wikipedia article on Thomas Pynchon tickles my fancy. I wrote big chunks of it, including that list of cameos promised to be in **Against the Day**! Ain't the Matrix a small world after all? And because it comes from me, you **know** it's reliable. (-;

[Sean Carroll]

Matt, Summers did not leave because of that speech and its fall-out -- there were much more important reasons, the speech was just the final straw. And the objections to the speech were most definitely not that he "proposed the possibility of cognitive differences," that's a complete straw man. The objections were that he was (1) woefully underinformed, (2) wrong, (3) speaking from a position where his words had a potential (and, as it turns out, very real) negative impact on girls and women in science. Nobody sensible objects to psychologists studying gender factors in cognition, but that has nothing to do with what got Summers in trouble.

[JenLucPiquant]

I was just about to make the exact same points as Sean, who phrased them so clearly and succinctly that I feel no need to add much more to the discussion. I don't think there's any truly substantive disagreement here, but feelings tend to run high where Larry Summers is concerned, and I think Matt read more into Lee's tossed-off original comment than she'd intended. Summers is the human equivalent of a "red flag word": perhaps his name just shouldn't be uttered in serious discussions of women in physics. Like Voldemort. Or "Firefly." :)

[JenLucPiquant]

And one more thought on the name thing, called to mind by Blake's comment on Tycho vs Kelper: part of that might be related to time period, geographical region, or any other number of factors. Case in point: Leonardo da Vinci is simply referred to as "Leonardo" by historians. "Da Vinci" indicated where he was from; as an ilegitimate offspring, technically he had no last name.

[Blake Stacey]

I know very little about Voldemort, but I can see several reasons why one could legitimately bring **Firefly** into a discussion of women in physics. In two words, "River Tam".

Or wait, am I missing a point here?

On the naming thing: quite a few notable scientists are commonly remembered by aristocratic titles, not names. We have the "kelvin" as a unit of temperature, but the man was William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin (1824--1907). Likewise for Rayleigh, he whose scattering explains why the sky is blue, who was John William Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh (1842--1919).

(Bonus points for those who recall Voltaire's real name without looking it up!)

[Walt]

Within mathematics, Kovalesky is quite famous. I'm surprised that she isn't more famous in physics, since she arguably discovered the existence of characteristic directions in PDEs, and for the Kovalesky top, one of the few exactly integrable classical mechanical systems known in the nineteenth century.

Weierstrass is as famous as a mathematician can be, which apparently isn't very famous.

[Fred Ross]

Nice piece! On the name dispute, I'm going to weigh in for Kovalevskaya. I believe a lot of the tendency to refer to scientists by their last name, or by their title if they had one, comes from the usages of the British upper classes. It has perpetuated partially by inertia, partially because it does provide the easiest means to identify a person by a short moniker (how many Johns are there?).

With Russian names, particularly of aristocrats, the situation is even more extreme. First a short primer: Russians generally have three names: a first name, a patronymic, and a surname. In this case, Sofia is the first name (Sonya is its diminutive, to be used by close friends and family). Vasilyevna is the patronymic, and is formed by taking either the mother or father's name and (for a girl) adding -evna to it. Addressing an acquaintance or any situation where you would refer to someone as Mr. such-and-such in 19th C. English, you would use the first name and patronymic (Sofia Vasilyevna). For my Russian friends, I generally use the diminutive ("Ulia", for instance), unless they have just done something egregious ("Uliana Katerinevna, what have you done!").

However, because Russians know that grandchildren will have to carry a name given to a child, they tend to be conservative about names, and so the situation is almost worse.

Weierstraß isn't as famous probably because he was a down to earth guy who spent a lot of his life teaching at Gymnasium (you could actually be a high school teacher and do research then), and produced such little gems as the Weierstraß approxiimation theorem, forms of which make large swathes of modern analysis possibly by reducing it back to continuous functions, and the Weierstaß function, a function which is everywhere continuous and nowhere differentiable.

And why does anyone still pay attention to Larry Summers, who has spent most of his life demonstrating that he's a moron?

[Walt]

Weierstrauss is also responsible for the epsilon-delta definition of limits, the scourge of calculus students everywhere. He deserves to be famous for that reason alone. :-)

If you want an example of someone who's unjustly forgotten, I nominate Grete Hermann. She was the first person to point out that Von Neumann's proof that hidden variable theories of quantum mechanics is wrong, a fact rediscovered 40 years later by John Bell. I created a skeleton page for her in Wikipedia, but more detail is needed.

[JenLucPiquant]

Thanks for the tip on Grete Hermann! I did a quick Google, and she's definitely fodder for a future post.... especially since, among other things, it would force me to discipline myself to fine-tune my shockingly inadequate grasp of Bell's theorem. :) I grok the basics, but the devil's in the details.

[Sakura-chan]

You should do a post on why famous physicists are more famous than famous mathematicians.

[Frank B]

I stepped into this cocktail party from Peter Woit's blog where he mentioned this Kovaleskaya thread. There exists quite a number of books and papers on SK and her work, as well as a few literary pieces of her own (which one an find listed by Joan Spicci). I once even heard about a Swedish film portraying her: Berget på månens baksida/The mountain on the back side of the moon//dir. Lennart Hjulström, 1984. In fact the 80s seemed to have been a time of SK-renaissance with sympiosia and books on SK (A. H. Koblitz, R. Cooke, P. Kochina, L. Keen, ... 3 books related to SK were reviewed in Physics Today, 1984, April). I myself learned about SK from her novels and essays, and the charming biography written by her close friend Anna Carlotta Leffler (whose brother was Gösta Mittag-Leffler, the mathematician who got SK to Sweden). From the portraits in the book one can BTW see that she used to write her name as Sophie Kov/w/alevski. From Leffler's piece (includes some letters from SK too) and SK's novels one gets a very vivid picture of a lost world, the fin de siècle Europe with idealistc intellectuals gathering in Paris, Zürich, Naples, etc. At the same time it is sad to think how cruelly their dreams were to be crushed later. There is also a sad trail in Leffler's story about SK. SK died young (41), leaving her daughter Foufi behind her, and she never seems to have felt truly loved (reading her Russian childhood it is apparent that she craved for an attention from her parents that she never received). But smart people often have such high standards which reality cannot meet. Finally about SK's impact on math - I think she could have had a more lasting influence if she had written a stylish textbook or monograph on PDE or rotating bodies, which she might have done had she survived past 41 [the other option is to crack a famous problem, prove a useful lemma (or get associated with one), or have a loyal group of disciples].