15 ms·

Hilda Geiringer Reshaped Mathematics

70 points by sonabinu 7y ago

wolfi1 7y ago
if we are talking about female mathematicians don't forget Emmy Noether: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether
- Koshkin 7y ago
  We are talking about a migrant Jewish female mathematician who was discriminated against trying to start a career in the USA in mid-1940s.
  - wolfi1 7y ago
    Emmy Noether had a comparable background and had her problems with academia, too
    - Gondolin 7y ago
      Yes, Emmy Noether was a pure genius (one of the greatest mathematician of all time), and was never named full professor (even though she had Hilbert support).
  - oefrha 7y ago
    Who did not reshape mathematics, unlike Emmy Noether.
    - fmajid 7y ago
      Yes. When I read the headline, I thought it was going to be about Noether. Even then, I'd argue she reshaped physics, not mathematics itself, unlike, say, Galois or Gödel.
- pixelpoet 7y ago
  She's one of the few true aliens I regard as up there with von Neumann and Einstein, who have some kind of ridiculous direct line of communication with the fabric of reality.
  - growlist 7y ago
    You're doing a bit of a disservice to Newton and Maxwell there, surely. And lots of Einstein's work was derivative of others.
    - fmajid 7y ago
      Special Relativity was completely ripped off from Henri Poincaré and Hendrik Lorentz (but then they were not German and the physics establishment was dominated by Germans at the time). Einstein's 1921 Nobel prize pointedly ignores Relativity and was awarded for his work on the photoelectric effect, a backhanded slap if there were none.
sp332 7y ago
This title isn't very good. At least name the person.
- concordDance 7y ago
  "Reshaped Mathematics" is quite an exageration.
  - 77pt77 7y ago
    I think it's a pun with plasticity, a field where she did work in.
sonabinu 7y ago
BBC has a way of doing this with titles. They start with a very broad title and then narrow it as the story ages.
EliRivers 7y ago
Classic HN baiting; I predict the comments will be over 50% meta-commentary about the title's inaccuracy and possibly something about the principle of highlighting female mathematicians, a sizeable chunk on suggestions for female mathematicians with a larger impact, and very little about Geiringer, her mathematics and her legacy...
- fzeroracer 7y ago
  It's incredibly unfortunate that you're correct, but I'm also not surprised. Topics like these on HN inevitability devolve into complaints about the media or attempting to divert discussion into something entirely different (like missed male geniuses). Nevermind the pun people missed in the article title as they immediately jumped to attempt to discredit the entire thing.
LanceH 7y ago
Summary: Woman contributes to mathematics; can't find appropriate academic position because she isn't a man. As far as the article goes there is a bit about her contribution which is over inflated to, "reshaped maths". This is used as a jumping off point to talk about how she can't find the same work her male counterparts would, skills being equal. Finding out that professors were mostly men in the early to mid 20th century is hardly noteworthy but the article spends some time on it. Finally a bit of commentary by the author about missed opportunities because people other than white men have ideas, too. The last seems to be the point, but it reads as an attempt to find misery and highlight it, rather than perhaps remembering the woman and her contribution. The contribution the author is really interested in is the failure and the opportunity it presents to make a trite statement about equality of opportunity. All with a click bait title.
- whatshisface 7y ago
  If the BBC is trying to build a case that female mathematicians were treated poorly 70 years ago compared to their male counterparts, they would somehow need to show that there wasn't a similar supply of men who made an obscure but significant contribution only to get coldly treated by the establishment (somehow I think there's no shortage). We must be careful to not fall prey to example-ism, building cases out of salient examples instead of evenly sampled trends.
  - jordigh 7y ago
    Let's not fall into denialism here. There's absolutely no doubt that being a Jewish woman mathematician in the 1930s was doubly difficult than being a male Jewish mathematician -- double the discrimination. Calling Geiringer's situation "example-ism" is up there with doubting the sky is blue because I said I saw blue skies in Italy one time.
    - whatshisface 7y ago
      I have never seen any evidence that women were discriminated against in 1930s mathematics other than specific stories about women being treated coldly by the establishment. I have certainly never seen anyone compare their cold treatment to the ambient coldness. Look at it this way. If I told you every time a coin came up heads, how many reports would it take for you to conclude that it was biased? The right answer is "the conclusion may never be reached," because I'm not allowing you to tally up the number of times it came up tails. Likewise, despite the huge number of stories about women being denied appointments despite having made significant contributions, no conclusion can be drawn until there is some indication that the effect is unique to women. Another important point is that even if the 1930s were awful and sexist, there may have been islands of relatively fair people. So in the interest of remembing them as they deserve, it is best to check each social group individually for evidence of their bad behavior, so that you don't end up remembering the one admissions committee that wasn't sexist as just another bias enforcement team.
jordigh 7y ago
While I don't doubt that Geiringer did a lot of important work, I'm a little frustrated with how difficult it is to read about that work itself. Look at a Wikipedia article about a relatively obscure mathematician, say, Robert Remak: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Remak_(mathematician) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Remak_(mathematician) Right away it says what fields he worked in and mentions some of his results. The rest of the article goes into a bit more depth about his work and then finishes off with a paragraph about the tragedy in his life. Compare now with Hilda Geiringer's article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilda_Geiringer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilda_Geiringer Her work is described in very vague strokes, "two variable Fourier series" and then mentions statistics, probability, and plasticity... so, what did she do exactly? These are very broad fields! The article does mention the Geiringer equations, but there's no corresponding Wikipedia article about them. The majority of Geiringer's article is instead taken up by the fact that she was a Jewish woman with relatively very little attention given to her mathematics. To be clear, I'm not saying that this is a Wikipedia-exclusive phenomenon. The BBC article is also rather "soft", as a popular article must be out of necessity, but for minorities, sometimes they (we?) must deal being talked about in nothing but soft articles. The geek feminism wiki calls this the unicorn law: https://geekfeminism.wikia.org/wiki/Unicorn_Law https://geekfeminism.wikia.org/wiki/Unicorn_Law
- whatshisface 7y ago
  Talking about minorities is an extension of the human drive to find one's place among other people, which is an extremely high priority in almost everyone's lives. As a result, far more people are interested in talking about minorities (which fulfills a basic drive) than are interested in talking about math. So much so that a very significant fraction of articles related to math or any other topic that otherwise doesn't get a lot of light in the public arena are motivated by the social desire.
- growlist 7y ago
  For some reason some people are incredibly hostile to this suggestion, but I think the BBC has dumbed down pretty drastically over the years - and this can be pretty easily verified by comparing their output from decades past with today's. Older popular science TV programmes sometimes even had - shock horror! - in depth discussion of actual mathematical equations. By contrast, I watched a Brian Cox space series recently in which I recall a single mention of maths, and that was a few animated formulae floating around a beautifully rendered planetary scene as graphics without real explanation, whilst some dreamy ambient synth music played in the background. There's a massive difference in style, content, sophistication of ideas presented, and density of information. The new stuff poses as educational, but delivers very little proper detail. Apart from that, I think that surely it would have served this woman's memory far better to tell us the details of what she achieved, and how her work has been built on, rather than making her victimhood the main thrust. I'll bet she'd have preferred to be remembered as a mathematician rather than a victim.
growlist 7y ago
Everyone should have equality of opportunity, including heterosexual white men.
- Voloskaya 7y ago
  Yes, but should white men have all of the opportunities though? That's the point of the article.
- krapp 7y ago
  Heterosexual white men are the most politically, culturally and financially powerful demographic in all of human history. Don't worry about them, they'll be just fine.
  - bingerman 7y ago
    As a heterosexual white male I find that oversimplification disrespectful. None of my known ancestors had anything that could be described as power or wealth, quite the contrary. I find it insulting to blame my skin color and sexual orientation because the elite who mistreated my ancestors mistreated also other races.
pksdjfikkkkdsff 7y ago
She may be cool, but she didn't "reshape Mathematics". Wish such articles would come without so much hyperbole. And as for missed geniuses, there are many missed male geniuses, too, many famously so (even Einstein didn't get a position as a professor at first). They suggest only women are overlooked, which is untrue. There are also examples of female mathematicians even further back being fostered by famous mathematicians.
- minikites 7y ago
  >And as for missed geniuses, there are many missed male geniuses Not everything needs to be about men.
  - pksdjfikkkkdsff 7y ago
    That's not the point. The point is that it is a lie to claim she was forgotten because she was a woman.
- klyrs 7y ago
  > She may be cool, but she didn't "reshape Mathematics". You missed the pun.
  - pksdjfikkkkdsff 7y ago
    No I get it, her formula is about ideal shapes (of bridges). It is still misleading. They could have written "who reshaped bridges". I suppose Grothendieck reshaped Mathematics - he invented a new way of looking at things, that made it possible to prove a host of new things. In a sense perhaps every mathematical result reshapes mathematics. But they used it here to inflate her importance, to make it seem outrageous that she was supposedly forgotten. As if many Mathematicians are being remembered in general.
kfalencik 7y ago
Quick, delete this before feminisnazis see it

70 points by sonabinu 7y ago

if we are talking about female mathematicians don't forget Emmy Noether: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether

Koshkin 7y ago
We are talking about a migrant Jewish female mathematician who was discriminated against trying to start a career in the USA in mid-1940s.
- wolfi1 7y ago
  Emmy Noether had a comparable background and had her problems with academia, too
  - Gondolin 7y ago
    Yes, Emmy Noether was a pure genius (one of the greatest mathematician of all time), and was never named full professor (even though she had Hilbert support).
- oefrha 7y ago
  Who did not reshape mathematics, unlike Emmy Noether.
  - fmajid 7y ago
    Yes. When I read the headline, I thought it was going to be about Noether. Even then, I'd argue she reshaped physics, not mathematics itself, unlike, say, Galois or Gödel.
pixelpoet 7y ago
She's one of the few true aliens I regard as up there with von Neumann and Einstein, who have some kind of ridiculous direct line of communication with the fabric of reality.
- growlist 7y ago
  You're doing a bit of a disservice to Newton and Maxwell there, surely. And lots of Einstein's work was derivative of others.
  - fmajid 7y ago
    Special Relativity was completely ripped off from Henri Poincaré and Hendrik Lorentz (but then they were not German and the physics establishment was dominated by Germans at the time). Einstein's 1921 Nobel prize pointedly ignores Relativity and was awarded for his work on the photoelectric effect, a backhanded slap if there were none.

sp332 7y ago

This title isn't very good. At least name the person.

concordDance 7y ago
"Reshaped Mathematics" is quite an exageration.
- 77pt77 7y ago
  I think it's a pun with plasticity, a field where she did work in.

sonabinu 7y ago

BBC has a way of doing this with titles. They start with a very broad title and then narrow it as the story ages.

EliRivers 7y ago

Classic HN baiting; I predict the comments will be over 50% meta-commentary about the title's inaccuracy and possibly something about the principle of highlighting female mathematicians, a sizeable chunk on suggestions for female mathematicians with a larger impact, and very little about Geiringer, her mathematics and her legacy...

fzeroracer 7y ago
It's incredibly unfortunate that you're correct, but I'm also not surprised. Topics like these on HN inevitability devolve into complaints about the media or attempting to divert discussion into something entirely different (like missed male geniuses). Nevermind the pun people missed in the article title as they immediately jumped to attempt to discredit the entire thing.

LanceH 7y ago

Summary: Woman contributes to mathematics; can't find appropriate academic position because she isn't a man. As far as the article goes there is a bit about her contribution which is over inflated to, "reshaped maths". This is used as a jumping off point to talk about how she can't find the same work her male counterparts would, skills being equal. Finding out that professors were mostly men in the early to mid 20th century is hardly noteworthy but the article spends some time on it. Finally a bit of commentary by the author about missed opportunities because people other than white men have ideas, too. The last seems to be the point, but it reads as an attempt to find misery and highlight it, rather than perhaps remembering the woman and her contribution. The contribution the author is really interested in is the failure and the opportunity it presents to make a trite statement about equality of opportunity. All with a click bait title.

whatshisface 7y ago
If the BBC is trying to build a case that female mathematicians were treated poorly 70 years ago compared to their male counterparts, they would somehow need to show that there wasn't a similar supply of men who made an obscure but significant contribution only to get coldly treated by the establishment (somehow I think there's no shortage). We must be careful to not fall prey to example-ism, building cases out of salient examples instead of evenly sampled trends.
- jordigh 7y ago
  Let's not fall into denialism here. There's absolutely no doubt that being a Jewish woman mathematician in the 1930s was doubly difficult than being a male Jewish mathematician -- double the discrimination. Calling Geiringer's situation "example-ism" is up there with doubting the sky is blue because I said I saw blue skies in Italy one time.
  - whatshisface 7y ago
    I have never seen any evidence that women were discriminated against in 1930s mathematics other than specific stories about women being treated coldly by the establishment. I have certainly never seen anyone compare their cold treatment to the ambient coldness. Look at it this way. If I told you every time a coin came up heads, how many reports would it take for you to conclude that it was biased? The right answer is "the conclusion may never be reached," because I'm not allowing you to tally up the number of times it came up tails. Likewise, despite the huge number of stories about women being denied appointments despite having made significant contributions, no conclusion can be drawn until there is some indication that the effect is unique to women. Another important point is that even if the 1930s were awful and sexist, there may have been islands of relatively fair people. So in the interest of remembing them as they deserve, it is best to check each social group individually for evidence of their bad behavior, so that you don't end up remembering the one admissions committee that wasn't sexist as just another bias enforcement team.

jordigh 7y ago

While I don't doubt that Geiringer did a lot of important work, I'm a little frustrated with how difficult it is to read about that work itself. Look at a Wikipedia article about a relatively obscure mathematician, say, Robert Remak: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Remak_(mathematician) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Remak_(mathematician) Right away it says what fields he worked in and mentions some of his results. The rest of the article goes into a bit more depth about his work and then finishes off with a paragraph about the tragedy in his life. Compare now with Hilda Geiringer's article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilda_Geiringer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilda_Geiringer Her work is described in very vague strokes, "two variable Fourier series" and then mentions statistics, probability, and plasticity... so, what did she do exactly? These are very broad fields! The article does mention the Geiringer equations, but there's no corresponding Wikipedia article about them. The majority of Geiringer's article is instead taken up by the fact that she was a Jewish woman with relatively very little attention given to her mathematics. To be clear, I'm not saying that this is a Wikipedia-exclusive phenomenon. The BBC article is also rather "soft", as a popular article must be out of necessity, but for minorities, sometimes they (we?) must deal being talked about in nothing but soft articles. The geek feminism wiki calls this the unicorn law: https://geekfeminism.wikia.org/wiki/Unicorn_Law https://geekfeminism.wikia.org/wiki/Unicorn_Law

whatshisface 7y ago
Talking about minorities is an extension of the human drive to find one's place among other people, which is an extremely high priority in almost everyone's lives. As a result, far more people are interested in talking about minorities (which fulfills a basic drive) than are interested in talking about math. So much so that a very significant fraction of articles related to math or any other topic that otherwise doesn't get a lot of light in the public arena are motivated by the social desire.
growlist 7y ago
For some reason some people are incredibly hostile to this suggestion, but I think the BBC has dumbed down pretty drastically over the years - and this can be pretty easily verified by comparing their output from decades past with today's. Older popular science TV programmes sometimes even had - shock horror! - in depth discussion of actual mathematical equations. By contrast, I watched a Brian Cox space series recently in which I recall a single mention of maths, and that was a few animated formulae floating around a beautifully rendered planetary scene as graphics without real explanation, whilst some dreamy ambient synth music played in the background. There's a massive difference in style, content, sophistication of ideas presented, and density of information. The new stuff poses as educational, but delivers very little proper detail. Apart from that, I think that surely it would have served this woman's memory far better to tell us the details of what she achieved, and how her work has been built on, rather than making her victimhood the main thrust. I'll bet she'd have preferred to be remembered as a mathematician rather than a victim.

growlist 7y ago

Everyone should have equality of opportunity, including heterosexual white men.

Voloskaya 7y ago
Yes, but should white men have all of the opportunities though? That's the point of the article.
krapp 7y ago
Heterosexual white men are the most politically, culturally and financially powerful demographic in all of human history. Don't worry about them, they'll be just fine.
- bingerman 7y ago
  As a heterosexual white male I find that oversimplification disrespectful. None of my known ancestors had anything that could be described as power or wealth, quite the contrary. I find it insulting to blame my skin color and sexual orientation because the elite who mistreated my ancestors mistreated also other races.

pksdjfikkkkdsff 7y ago

She may be cool, but she didn't "reshape Mathematics". Wish such articles would come without so much hyperbole. And as for missed geniuses, there are many missed male geniuses, too, many famously so (even Einstein didn't get a position as a professor at first). They suggest only women are overlooked, which is untrue. There are also examples of female mathematicians even further back being fostered by famous mathematicians.

minikites 7y ago
>And as for missed geniuses, there are many missed male geniuses Not everything needs to be about men.
- pksdjfikkkkdsff 7y ago
  That's not the point. The point is that it is a lie to claim she was forgotten because she was a woman.
klyrs 7y ago
> She may be cool, but she didn't "reshape Mathematics". You missed the pun.
- pksdjfikkkkdsff 7y ago
  No I get it, her formula is about ideal shapes (of bridges). It is still misleading. They could have written "who reshaped bridges". I suppose Grothendieck reshaped Mathematics - he invented a new way of looking at things, that made it possible to prove a host of new things. In a sense perhaps every mathematical result reshapes mathematics. But they used it here to inflate her importance, to make it seem outrageous that she was supposedly forgotten. As if many Mathematicians are being remembered in general.

kfalencik 7y ago

Quick, delete this before feminisnazis see it