Women Mathematicians

It is good timing that our perspectives class is currently learning about women in the workforce. Last night I read the part in my book called The Lady Tasting Tea where the author, David Salsburg discusses famous women in history's mathematics accomplishments. The contributions of the specific important women were, oddly enough, not talked about until page 197 out of 309 pages.

The reason for this domination of men is because women weren't really the "brains" of mathematics at first. Many women interested in math were hired to do detailed calculations in the field and were even called "computers". They mainly did the tedious work of the hand-crank calculators. The women got this kind of work because they are generally known to be more patient to check and recheck the accuracy of the math more than men possibly would.

Indeed, women were basically the background of all the work like in pictures of famous mathematician Karl Pearson. But actually, I think that they were ones of the most essential parts of the field. Without the women doing calculations, there could possibly be no improvement of mathematical theories.

This changed in the twentieth century because of Jerzy Neyman. He greatly supported the work of women and helped them publish papers, etc. Only about 30% of statistical journals have women contributors.
This was about the same time that Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa officially had a complete statistics department. It was the first in the United States to be full-fledged. Gertrude Cox, an excellent scientist in the math department and beloved teacher, was involved in starting an alike statistics section at Iowa State’s sister school, North Carolina State at Raleigh. Gertrude wanted to make sure that she was on the list among ten men that also contributed to the department’s creation. The writer of the letter with the list of people was written by George Snedecor who almost forgot to include her but in the end added this: “These are the ten best men I can think of. But, if you want the best person, I would recommend Gertrude Cox.”

This was just one of the many times that women have been “forgotten” because most people in that time were not used to women working with such great prominence in a certain field, especially mathematics.