Don't make me regret this ...
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@antoinechambertloir For the purposes of engaging younger students, a list of random people of whom they've never heard is possibly not the best thing to do. Yes, these are (potentially) important people to be remembered, but creating engagement in students is perhaps not going to be helped by such a list.
This is hard. This is very hard, bordering on impossible. But I'm trying to connect things students have heard of with each other, and with new things they can learn about.
Newton, the Great Plague, and the Great Fire of London is a well-known and well-established connection.
Question: What was happening in Europe when Gauss was around? What music? What politicians? Who might he have met?
For example, Gauss and Beethoven were contemporaries.
That sort of thing.
CC: @e7_87
@ColinTheMathmo @antoinechambertloir
Feel bad; as a female math enthusiasts on the above list I only knew Dusa McDuff, Maryam Mirzakhani, Olga Taussky-Todd... And I believe I did read Vera Sós's wiki-bio... -
@antoinechambertloir For the purposes of engaging younger students, a list of random people of whom they've never heard is possibly not the best thing to do. Yes, these are (potentially) important people to be remembered, but creating engagement in students is perhaps not going to be helped by such a list.
This is hard. This is very hard, bordering on impossible. But I'm trying to connect things students have heard of with each other, and with new things they can learn about.
Newton, the Great Plague, and the Great Fire of London is a well-known and well-established connection.
Question: What was happening in Europe when Gauss was around? What music? What politicians? Who might he have met?
For example, Gauss and Beethoven were contemporaries.
That sort of thing.
CC: @e7_87
@ColinTheMathmo I was reacting to some sentence, earlier in the thread, by somebody else, that I read as “no woman has done notable things” and my — angry — answer was, “maybe learn what these women have done before saying such a thing.”
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@ColinTheMathmo
Beatrice Shilling (aeronautics)
Janet Taylor (astronomy, navigation)
Rosalind_Franklin
Valentina Tereshkova
Dorothy Hodgkin
Tu Youyou (pharmaceutical chemist)
Baroness Ingrid Daubechies (JPEG)
Grace Hopper
Gladys Mae West (GPS)
Emmy Noether (symmetry)
Mary Cartwright (chaos theory)
Annie Scott Dill Maunder
Caroline Herschel
Gerty Theresa Cori (glycogen)
Williamina Fleming (astronomy)
Alice Augusta Ball (chemistry)
Katherine Johnson (orbital mechanics)@ColinTheMathmo
Historically important though Valentina Tereshkova is, it's also worth noting that she was very much a political pawn in the space-race. The Soviets (like ALL politicians) generally only did morally good things in order to draw attention to themselves or away from their imagined enemies. -
@ColinTheMathmo @antoinechambertloir
Feel bad; as a female math enthusiasts on the above list I only knew Dusa McDuff, Maryam Mirzakhani, Olga Taussky-Todd... And I believe I did read Vera Sós's wiki-bio...@e7_87 @ColinTheMathmo there's no need to feel bad. There must be sociological reasons why women are not remembered. For example we value the final steps more than the elaboration of an invisible theory. Maybe that's why some brilliant women preferred doing that kind of things than exposing themselves. Have a look at Stegun's work. Spending a whole professional life maintaining tables of special functions which were used in all of applied math and engineering, before computer programs could make the job for everybody.
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@ColinTheMathmo for events rather than people: the reign of terror. Which explains why several famous French mathematicians and scientists died in 1794.
@ColinTheMathmo
Gutenberg and his moveable type press (not the first, but extremely important an event nevertheless).
Luther and the 95 theses.
Columbus' voyages to the new world.
Arthur Conan Doyle.
Robert Louis Stevenson.
Charles Dickens.
Emily Bronte.
Jane Austen.
Mary Wallstonecraft.
Mary Shelley.You could have indicators for longer eras. So for example, the height of the Aztec empire, various other civilisations in the Americas. Or for various influential dynasties in China.
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@spacemagick I suspect from the smiley that you do know about the film "Hidden Figures"
@ColinTheMathmo
Now you mention it the title rings a bell. My maths/computing background probably makes me somewhat bias as to which people count as 'famous'/worthy of fame. -
@ColinTheMathmo
Gutenberg and his moveable type press (not the first, but extremely important an event nevertheless).
Luther and the 95 theses.
Columbus' voyages to the new world.
Arthur Conan Doyle.
Robert Louis Stevenson.
Charles Dickens.
Emily Bronte.
Jane Austen.
Mary Wallstonecraft.
Mary Shelley.You could have indicators for longer eras. So for example, the height of the Aztec empire, various other civilisations in the Americas. Or for various influential dynasties in China.
@ColinTheMathmo dates for when various countries were founded. A lot of them are surprisingly recent.
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@pascaline Good shout:
Melba Roy Mouton
Katherine Johnson
Dorothy Vaughan
Mary JacksonBut the problem becomes one of the timeline and database becoming "too complete", and hence "overly complex" and thereby effectively inaccessible.
But absolutely, if choices are to be made, these people should be close to the top.
Yes, absolutely!
And also the more diverse the better, so doctors, analysts, mathematicians, and many more.
There was also Aletta Jacobs, the first woman in the Netherlands to attend a college, she became the first female physician, fought for women's rights, wanted to deregulate prostitution, and even founded the first birth control clinic. She was a hero!
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This list has mostly (but not entirely!) exactly them, but here are a few.
Which of your favourites are missing? In particular, what major historical events would school children know, to allow these to be put into some sort of historical context?
And yes, I am thinking of asking some school kids for "Famous Things".
Galileo
Nelson (Trafalgar)
Wellington (Waterloo)
Newton
Macchiavelli
Shakespeare
Pythagoras
Socrates
Plato
Aristotle
Alexander the Great
Archimedes
Al-Khwarizmi
Ibn Al-Haytham
Babbage
Turing
Omar Khayyam
Jabir Ibn Haiyan
Ramanujan2/n
@ColinTheMathmo
Margaret Elaine Hamilton (software team lead for the Apollo Guidance Computer)
Henrietta Swan Leavitt (Cepheid Period Luminosity Relationship) -
I don't think I've seen anyone else mention him, but in terms of situating developments in maths alongside more well-known historical events, then... Shakespeare. Born in between publication of Robert Recorde's two important books that helped to embed an entirely new number system into British life, industry, and commerce. He and his own father would have learnt not just different algorithms for calculating in their respective school careers, but entirely different number _systems_, and there's evidence of Bill playing with this new-fangled system throughout his famous works.
@TeaKayB @ColinTheMathmo then of course Lewis Carroll.
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@antoinechambertloir For the purposes of engaging younger students, a list of random people of whom they've never heard is possibly not the best thing to do. Yes, these are (potentially) important people to be remembered, but creating engagement in students is perhaps not going to be helped by such a list.
This is hard. This is very hard, bordering on impossible. But I'm trying to connect things students have heard of with each other, and with new things they can learn about.
Newton, the Great Plague, and the Great Fire of London is a well-known and well-established connection.
Question: What was happening in Europe when Gauss was around? What music? What politicians? Who might he have met?
For example, Gauss and Beethoven were contemporaries.
That sort of thing.
CC: @e7_87
@ColinTheMathmo @antoinechambertloir Colin, after reading ur replies, I guessed I understand what kinds of teaching materials you are trying to produce.
As others mentioned, the story that Sophie Germain pretended as male to work on math, and her communications with Lagrange and /Gauss/, is a good choice.
The life of Vera Rubin is also worth mentioning; her early career faced explicit sexism and she fought back. "Don't let anyone keep you down for silly reasons such as who you are. And don't worry about prizes and fame. The real prize is finding something new out there." What an encouraging quote! Also words disprise those scientists lost their integrity due to prize and fame.
/Hilbert/'s problems have been important. And Julia Robinson (thanks Antoine). [wikipedia]" ... was not allowed to teach in the Mathematics Department at Berkeley after marrying Raphael M. Robinson in 1941, ", and she chose to teach in Statistics department and left research math for 5~6 year. And she did that work related to the 10th Problem after getting the opportunity of back to math! This is another female story worth telling.
Julia Bowman Robinson - Biography
Julia B Robinson worked on computability, decision problems and non-standard models of arithmetic.
Maths History (mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk)
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@suearcher This is part of the problem ... these people need to be better know, but even we need to look them up.
I'm guessing that many young people would be hard pressed to name any mathematicians (as opposed to scientists) so it's probably good if you can introduce them to a good proportion of male and female ones!
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Marie Curie
Rosalind Franklin
Ada Lovelace
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin
Jocelyn Bell Burnell3/n
@ColinTheMathmo
Hypatia
Emilie du Chatelet
Maria Lombardini Sirmen
Lady Julian of Norwich
Hildegard of Bingen -
@antoinechambertloir For the purposes of engaging younger students, a list of random people of whom they've never heard is possibly not the best thing to do. Yes, these are (potentially) important people to be remembered, but creating engagement in students is perhaps not going to be helped by such a list.
This is hard. This is very hard, bordering on impossible. But I'm trying to connect things students have heard of with each other, and with new things they can learn about.
Newton, the Great Plague, and the Great Fire of London is a well-known and well-established connection.
Question: What was happening in Europe when Gauss was around? What music? What politicians? Who might he have met?
For example, Gauss and Beethoven were contemporaries.
That sort of thing.
CC: @e7_87
@ColinTheMathmo @antoinechambertloir @e7_87 as somebody else mentioned here and elsewhere, Sophie Germain would be a perfect example for what you are trying to do if you connect her to Gauss, and bring up questions about why she pretends to be a man (even if you question whether or not Gauss would have listened to her had he known she was a woman).
I also think there is value in doing cross generational discussions (as I mentioned Pingala made discoveries that were replicated 1400 and 1800 years later by Fibonacci and Pascal) why is there attribution to Fibonacci and Pascal, and like Antoine has pointed out there are sociological reasons for this.
There are parallels between the lives of Hypatia, Maria Gaetana Agnesi and Ada Lovelace, but then there are also extreme dissimilarities between their lives.
You can mention Queen Dido and her solution to the isoperimetroc problem in the foundation of the city of Carthage. This connects to Virgil’s Aeneid.
You can also compare the lives of Sofya Kolavskeya and Maria Chudnovsky where there are parallels (born in Russia/Soviet Union, both left the country to pursue a higher degree, both made groundbreaking advances to a problem that had been open for many years) yet they were born a little over one hundred years and the conditions for the recognition of mathematic talent amongst women had changed (their lives have been completely different in many other aspects).
Somebody mentioned Ada Lovelace, her story has many connections to the beginnings of computer science, she was the daughter of Lord Byron, who was instrumental in the stories surrounding the creations of horror icons such as Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster.
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@ColinTheMathmo I was reacting to some sentence, earlier in the thread, by somebody else, that I read as “no woman has done notable things” and my — angry — answer was, “maybe learn what these women have done before saying such a thing.”
@antoinechambertloir I must have missed ... who said "no woman has done notable things" ??
Certainly I never said that ... where did you see it?
I'm confused as to exactly what you are responding to. I, for one, know a lot of notable things done by amazing women.
What is certainly true is that you have to dig quite hard to find them. They are there, but they are not as visible or celebrated.
That's not the same as saying "no woman has done notable things."
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@antoinechambertloir I must have missed ... who said "no woman has done notable things" ??
Certainly I never said that ... where did you see it?
I'm confused as to exactly what you are responding to. I, for one, know a lot of notable things done by amazing women.
What is certainly true is that you have to dig quite hard to find them. They are there, but they are not as visible or celebrated.
That's not the same as saying "no woman has done notable things."
@ColinTheMathmo you didn't say that, but the message you were answering.
(Add) after reading the beginning of tbe thread, I feel sorry to have stepped up into your conversation like this. -
I don't think I've seen anyone else mention him, but in terms of situating developments in maths alongside more well-known historical events, then... Shakespeare. Born in between publication of Robert Recorde's two important books that helped to embed an entirely new number system into British life, industry, and commerce. He and his own father would have learnt not just different algorithms for calculating in their respective school careers, but entirely different number _systems_, and there's evidence of Bill playing with this new-fangled system throughout his famous works.
@TeaKayB Shakespeare is on my original list, up-thread from here.
I've seen Rob Eastaway's talk about this.
There's also Sarah Hart's books about the connections between maths and literature.
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@ColinTheMathmo dates for when various countries were founded. A lot of them are surprisingly recent.
@Scmbradley @ColinTheMathmo to make this less eurocentric, I'd suggest also the dates of various countries being on one end subjugated and the other liberated from colonization. Both often also surprisingly recent.
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@TeaKayB Shakespeare is on my original list, up-thread from here.
I've seen Rob Eastaway's talk about this.
There's also Sarah Hart's books about the connections between maths and literature.
@ColinTheMathmo
Oops, missed him on there: couldn't see Birnam wood for the moving trees!Yes - plenty of literary links in Sarah Hart's stuff!
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@Scmbradley @ColinTheMathmo to make this less eurocentric, I'd suggest also the dates of various countries being on one end subjugated and the other liberated from colonization. Both often also surprisingly recent.
@pettter The danger is that any project like this turns into an overwhelmingly crowded attempt to list everything, and that would then get entirely ignored by everyone except those who take exception to things they think are missing.
I want to connect things young people have heard of, to things they may then find interesting or useful.
Have they heard of Mozart? Bach? Beethoven? Vivaldi? Tchaikovsky?
Have they heard of Michelangelo? Leonardo?
What maths was being done around then?
CC: @Scmbradley
