Don't make me regret this ...

[colinthemathmo@mathstodon.xyz]

@spacemagick Out of interest, how many of these people (who should be better known, and who I will definitely include (mostly)) do you think kids ... or adults ... will have heard of?

[scmbradley@mathstodon.xyz]

@ColinTheMathmo for events rather than people: the reign of terror. Which explains why several famous French mathematicians and scientists died in 1794.

[antoinechambertloir@mathstodon.xyz]

@e7_87 @ColinTheMathmo just lazily browsing Wikipedia's list of women in mathematics, I would suggest to look at the work of Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat, Nicole El Karoui, Shafi Goldwasser, Krystina Kuperberg, Olga Ladyzhenskaia, Dusa McDuff, Maryam Mirzakhani, Cathleen Morawetz, Ruth Moufang, Marina Ratner, Diana Shelstad, Vera Sós, Irene Stegun, Olga Taussky-Todd, Ulrike Tilman, Karen Uhlenbeck, Marie-France Vignéras, etc. For many of them, a Fields medal or a similar award would not have been inappropriate.

[teakayb@mathstodon.xyz]

@ColinTheMathmo

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.

[antoinechambertloir@mathstodon.xyz]

@e7_87 @ColinTheMathmo ... And if I were like to understand why many of those names belong to applied mathematics, then I would study the concept of gatekeeping.

[spacemagick@mastodon.social]

@ColinTheMathmo
And some less sciencey ones:
Hilda Matheson (BBC, 'Director of Talks')
Delia Derbyshire (BBC, electronic music)
Daphne Oram (BBC, electronic music)
Maddalena Fagandini (BBC, electronic music)

#BBC #music

[spacemagick@mastodon.social]

@ColinTheMathmo
Oh, maybe about half of them, if we're lucky.

[colinthemathmo@mathstodon.xyz]

@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

[spacemagick@mastodon.social]

@psu_13 @ColinTheMathmo
Definitely. She who pointed out the connection between symmetry and conservation laws.
#maths #physics

[colinthemathmo@mathstodon.xyz]

@spacemagick I think you'd find that if you polled secondary school students in the UK, the average of the number of these they have heard of would hover around 0.1.

I suspect most students will have heard of none of them.

Some will know of Katherine Johnson because of the film, and for those who do computing, a small proportion would know of Hopper.

[spacemagick@mastodon.social]

@ColinTheMathmo
There's a film? Didn't know that.

[colinthemathmo@mathstodon.xyz]

@spacemagick I suspect from the smiley that you do know about the film "Hidden Figures"

[e7_87@mathstodon.xyz]

@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@mathstodon.xyz]

@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.”

[spacemagick@mastodon.social]

@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.

[antoinechambertloir@mathstodon.xyz]

@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.

[scmbradley@mathstodon.xyz]

@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.

[spacemagick@mastodon.social]

@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.

[scmbradley@mathstodon.xyz]

@ColinTheMathmo dates for when various countries were founded. A lot of them are surprisingly recent.

[pascaline@mastodon.nl]

@ColinTheMathmo

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!