Don't make me regret this ...
-
@ColinTheMathmo
Sir Christopher Wren is another well-known historical figure whose mathematical connections are almost unheard of amongst the population at large.A certain someone will give me another funny look if I don't mention Mary Somerville.
On that note, I created some resources for @mathsweek.scot that aim to help people explore some Scottish mathematical figures: https://mathsweek.scot/schools/learning-resources/finn-finity-meets
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.
-
@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.
@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.
-
@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
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) -
@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?
@ColinTheMathmo
Oh, maybe about half of them, if we're lucky.
-
@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.
@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 Noether?
@psu_13 @ColinTheMathmo
Definitely. She who pointed out the connection between symmetry and conservation laws.
#maths #physics -
@ColinTheMathmo
Oh, maybe about half of them, if we're lucky.@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 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.
@ColinTheMathmo
There's a film? Didn't know that.
-
@ColinTheMathmo
There's a film? Didn't know that.@spacemagick I suspect from the smiley that you do know about the film "Hidden Figures"
-
@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.”
-
@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.
-
@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.
-
@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.
-
@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!
-
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.
-
@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)
