The 13th general meeting of European Women in Mathematics
http://www.maths.cam.ac.uk/ewm/ , open to members and non-members of EWM
http://www.math.helsinki.fi/EWM/, took place at the Center for Mathematical Sciences (CMS), University of Cambridge, England, from September 3 - 6 2007. We (
Sylvie Paycha and
Dusanka Perisic) had a great pleasure to participate in the Cambridge EWM meeting and meet a lot of brilliant women mathematicians.
Cheryl was the first lecturer at the meeting. She is a very successful and enthusiastic woman mathematician. You can find more about her at her official web page:http://www.maths.uwa.edu.au/portal_memberdata/praeger, which she is gradually updating, and which will eventually (again) be http://www.maths.uwa.edu.au/~praeger and from the interview she gave for Plus Magazine.
We have asked her to tell us a story about the obstacles she had to overcome, and also about one major event in her research career.
Here is Cheryl answer to our questions:
I remembered our conversation and my promise to write about my time in Cambridge 1985. I thought it might be best to send you a draft and see how it turns out.
So, “here it goes”.
Best wishes
Cheryl
In April 1985 I was 36 years old, married, raising two sons, one aged 6 and the other almost 3. I had been a full professor of Mathematics for almost 18 months at the University of Western Australia. Although it was with my husband John’s full support, I managed to attend conferences in Australian cities where my or John’s parents could help with the child-minding, I had not been out of the country for more than four years. There were no colleagues in my research area of Permutation Group Theory in Perth.
Moreover, in the few years after the announcement that the finite simple groups were now classified, in 1980 , the pace at which new results on permutation groups were appearing was rapidly accelerating. Publication was slow, and in those pre-internet years, the major source of news was a personal written correspondence. I felt that I was losing touch with major international new developments in Permutation Groups .
Two of my research colleagues, Jan Saxl and Martin Liebeck, were working in Cambridge and were visiting me separately for a couple of months; Jan in 1983 and Martin in 1984, their visits funded by the grants I had obtained from the Australian Research Grants Scheme. Jan and Martin applied for money from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council of the UK, so that I could make a six week research visit to Cambridge in 1985. My husband John supported my decision to go, and my mother and John’s mother both came to Perth for three-week stints helping John to look after our sons.
During those six weeks, Jan, Martin and I worked on a massive project, the classification of maximal factorizations of almost simple groups.
Our earlier research work suggested that a solution to this problem would be central to solving several important problems about permutation groups. Indeed, our classification proved to be a mathematical watershed. Not only did it enable us to classify the maximal subgroups of finite alternating and symmetric groups, our original motivation, but it also became a powerful tool in many investigations in a group theory and in other areas of algebra and combinatorics which involve group actions. Our memoir containing the proof is my most cited publication, and I still use it regularly.
My six weeks, spent as a research visitor at New Hall Cambridge, included opportunities to give lectures in Oxford, Cambridge and Royal Holloway, and to attend the Groups and Geometries conference at the research institute in Oberwolfach Germany. I did miss my family; during the conference in Germany my son Tim had his third birthday. I remember my telephone conversation with him that day: “It’s my birthday and it was a chocolate one”, he told me.
The visit was critical for my research career. It enabled me, at the time, to learn about new developments, and to strengthen contacts with mathematicians working in my research area. I also discovered that it was possible for me to make such trips occasionally to maintain the international links with my colleagues.
