Meet Irene Sciriha

Irene Sciriha

presently holds the post of associate professor in the math dept of the Faculty of Science at the University of Malta. She was awarded her Doctoral Ph.D. degree from Reading University, UK, where she had the privilege to work with the Euler prize winner Anthony Hilton, Nash Williams, David Stirling and Peter Rowlinson. The Institute of Combinatorics and its Applications of Canada elected her fellow on the basis of her contribution to mathematical knowledge.

She produced several papers, published in prestigious mathematical journals. Her main areas of research are in spectral graph theory, Combinatorics and linear algebra. She is particularly interested in graph spectra and is currently working jointly with professionals from Portugal, Serbia and Montenegro, England, Scotland and Italy on chemical structures, fullerenes, polynomial reconstruction and singular graphs. She has been invited regularly by universities abroad to deliver courses and give talks on her recent research.

For the Dept of Math, she has organised international and local conferences, seminars, workshops and Erasmus exchange programs. She was formerly convenor of EWM, chair of the gender issues committee at the UOM and editor of two professional journals.

The European Mathematical Society that holds the quadrennial European Congress of Math and awards prizes for cutting-edge innovations in math has appointed her vice-chair of the scientific committee for women. She is also Malta’s representative on The Helsinki Group of the European Commission that promotes the interests of Women Scientists in Europe.

Remarkable Women in Science

American Association for the Advancement of Science has published a booklet “Remarkable Women in Science”

We would like to drive your attention to the article:

Staying Power!

Have You Got What It Takes?

by Jennifer McElwain

If you are fascinated by science,

then a career in research is a great

choice for you. Women scientists

from around the world share six key

steps they have taken in order to

achieve their goals and dreams.

Step 1. Get the money

Jennifer McElwain has been fascinated by

science since her childhood in Ireland. Her

father was a chemical engineer, her mother

a keen gardener. “I knew the Latin names

of all the plants at the age of three. It was

seeded early.” After her Ph.D. Jennifer went

to the United States where she worked

at the Field Museum in Chicago, studying

the fossils of plants that had lived on Earth

millions of years ago. She also had fun with

organizing special events such as visits for

school children.

After 14 years, however, she was ready to

go for a higher position, and also longed

to return home, together with her scientist

husband and young daughter. She had to

face two challenges: find not only a position

back in Ireland, but also the funds to pay for

her research. The first she tackled by getting

a lectureship at University College Dublin

(UCD), bringing with her the skills and

techniques she had developed while in

the United States. The second hurdle

she overcame by winning a Marie Curie

Excellence award for €1.75 million. “It’s

been amazing to come back to Ireland

to a fast-track at UCD. I’m setting up a

really exciting lab on campus—all custom

designed.” Jennifer’s lab will mimic

changes that happened in the Earth’s

atmosphere 200 million years ago, to

test how similar changes linked to global

warming could affect today’s plants and

animals. Her award supports a team of

two postdocs and two Ph.D. students,

as well as securing a promise from

the university to take over the cost of

her salary.

Step 2. Get the training—even if it means having to travel far

Training abroad was a critical early step for Aderoju Osowole,

currently at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria. In 1998,

while a Ph.D. student, she won an award from the Third

World Academy of Sciences to travel to the Indian Institute of

Science’s Department of Inorganic and Physical Chemistry in

Bangalore.

“The Indian laboratories were well equipped and maintained,

with constant electricity and water supplies, even at weekends

and public holidays. In contrast, in Nigeria the dearth of

research facilities and constant power failures have impaired

our activities as researchers. Consequently we have spent

more time on teaching than on research.”

After returning to Nigeria, Aderoju was able to set up an

inorganic chemistry research unit at the University of Ibadan.

More recently, she traveled to Germany for further training

in physics on a George Forster Fellowship from the Alexander

von Humboldt Foundation. She believes that women

scientists have the ability to succeed. “Nowadays, women

scientists [in Nigeria] are held in high esteem, unlike before,

because experience has shown that women are diligent,

hardworking, and go-getters.”

Step 3. Get networking

“Women need to learn the importance of building national

and international networks, which they can begin by participating

at international conferences from an early stage and

by seeking out a mentor,” says Dolores J. Cahill, professor

at University College Dublin Conway Institute of Biomolecular

and Biomedical Research, Ireland.

Dolores left Ireland directly after her Ph.D. and spent 10

years in Germany, mainly at the Max-Planck Institute of

Molecular Genetics in Berlin, and was awarded a BioFuture

grant to develop protein array technology and to support the

co-founding of a proteomics company, Protagen AG.

Having returned to Ireland, Dolores is on the government’s

Advisory Science Council where she feels privileged to assist

in advancing science in Ireland. As a female she is often in

the minority, but does not feel the need to make an issue of

it. “Women should be noted for their scientific contribution

rather than the fact that they may be the only woman at

a meeting.”

Step 4. Start promoting yourself

Dame Julia Higgins, professor of polymer science at Imperial

College of Science and Technology in London, remembers

having to battle with her own modesty in order to declare

herself a candidate for a professorship. The departmental

professorial panel had nominated other candidates who

seemed to them to have better or more urgent cases, but

the Head of Department didn’t hesitate to support Julia’s

case once she had put herself forward. “Women tend to be

less definite about whether they ought to be pushing forward

for promotion—they don’t push themselves in appropriate

ways and they’re not as well networked as men, and therefore

less well informed.” Ironically, Julia notes that at Imperial,

those women who go for promotion are more successful

than the men.

Determined to help other women scientists, Julia has

helped to initiate new recruitment policies at Imperial to

make the process of applying for senior positions less

intimidating, particularly to women, and she has worked

with the Athena Project to encourage universities across

the United Kingdom to attract more women scientists to

top university posts. When she first became a professor

there were few other women faculty around her. “I felt rather

obvious and possibly a bit isolated, but it didn’t make me

want to stop, because it was all so interesting.”

Step 5. Find role models

Getting to know other senior women scientists

is a good way to overcome self-doubt,

according to Aoife Moloney, a lecturer at the

School of Electronic and Communications

Engineering, Dublin Institute of Technology

in Ireland. “A lot of women I know working in

engineering think they’re not great at engineering.

The men are more confident.” The

answer, she says, is to find role models. “I’ve

met a lot of women engineers who are two

or three years ahead of me and they say they

think they could be better, too. It’s good if you

hear that.” Keen to encourage other women

to take up engineering, she organizes parties

and educational events, as well as visiting

days for secondary schools.

Step 6. Plan your career

Many women scientists find that the very time at which they are ready to go for promotion is

also when they wish to start a family. Careful career planning—about both where to work, and

when to have a baby—is essential. For Lucia Reining, taking up a permanent position as a

researcher, and later director of research, at the French National Research Centre in a laboratory

of the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris was a key move in enabling her to combine having a

family with a career in physics. Lucia was only two weeks away from giving birth to her first

child when she interviewed for the position. She later had twin girls, and is now the head of

a team of 20 researchers, as well as the president of an international group, the European

Theoretical Spectroscopy Facility. The work requires a lot of time spent on administration and

finance as well as science, which can be stressful. “If I had not had the permanent position,

the probability that I would have given up at some point would have been extremely high.”

For Kate Nobes, a reader at the University of Bristol, UK, the question of whether or not she

could allow herself to have a second child had to be carefully balanced with the demands

of publishing academic papers. “It is a competitive job and if you want to compete you have

to work all hours.” Securing the lectureship in Bristol, and the job security that came with it,

enabled Kate to follow through with her long-term family plans.

Getting to know other senior

women scientists is a good

way to overcome self-doubt.

The 2009 European Mathematical Society lecturer

The 2009 European Mathematical Society lecturer will be Professor Ingrid Daubechies of Princeton University, and she will give some of her EMS lectures at the 14th general meeting of EWM, which is to be held in August 2009, at the Department of Mathematics and Informatics, Faculty of Sciences, University of Novi Sad, Serbia. Professor Daubechies will also , as EMS lecturer of the year 2009, give presentations at NuHAG (Numerical Harmonic Analysis Group), the University of Vienna.

Ingrid Daubechies has had a significant impact in numerous areas of applied mathematics and signal and image processing, with research accomplishments bridging across many scientific and engineering disciplines, resulting in over 100 publications and an influential and widely-read book. Her service record is also impressive, most notably in science and engineering publications as well as professional societies. She has directed programs with high impact on young scientists in a variety of fields. She is an inspiration to the entire mathematics community, especially to the women’s mathematics community.

Ingrid Daubechies received her BS and PhD in Physics at the Free University in Brussels, where she also taught for 12 years. She then moved to AT&T Bell Labs where she served as a leading authority on wavelet theory. Since 1993, she has been at the Mathematics Department and the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics at Princeton University. She became the first woman full professor in mathematics at Princeton University. She now holds the William R. Kenan Jr. Professorship.

Professor Daubechies has also received many awards and honors, including the Louis Empain Prize for Physics, MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, AMS Steele Prize for Exposition and Ruth Lyttle Satter Prize, and membership in the National Academy of Sciences. She was also awarded the International Society for Optical Engineering Recognition of Outstanding Achievement and the IEEE Information Theory Society Golden Jubilee award for Technological Innovation. In 2000, she became the first woman to receive the National Academy of Sciences Medal in Mathematics. She gave the Gibbs Lecture in 2005 and the Noether Lecture in 2006.

.

Meet Sujatha Ramdorai

Professor Sujatha Ramdorai , of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research received all her education in India and has been with TIFR since 1985, where she is now Associate Professor in the School of Mathematics. In recognition of her work on the arithmetic of algebraic varieties and her substantial contributions to non-commutative Iwasawa theory the Ramanujan Prize was awarded to her in 2006. You can find out more about it from an interview published on http://www.abelprisen.no/en/nyheter/artikler/sujatha.html

We have asked her to write a contribution for the blog. Here is her responce:

Dear Dusanka,

I finally found time to look at the blog and it is very nice. I havent yet figured out how I can upload material there, especially with links. Can you help me? In any case, I have nothing much to say now and will just send you an article I wrote for the `Women in Science’ initiative in India. It collects essays by various women scientists and will publish it as `Lilavati’s daughters’. You can perhaps upload this reply along with the essay for now. If you tell me how to use the blog, I can directly write some other time.

thanks very much and with best regards

sujatha

An austere beauty

The response of people, when they learn that I am a career mathematician has long been one of the following: “How fascinating, I have always loved mathematics and used to be quite good at it in my school years”; or “That was the subject I feared and hated most, how can someone be doing mathematics all of one’s life?” After the commercial success of John Nash’s life story, there is a third response: “Interesting, I saw the movie `A beautiful mind’, it is about a mathematician who was slightly crazy, and I loved it.” It is often difficult, at asocial level, to convey the pleasure of a life-long fascination with knowledge, and even more so when it is mathematical knowledge!

There was no academician in my immediate family but I was fortunate to be born in a family which revered education and knowledge. My attitude to academics was shaped by my grandmother, who all through her life lamented the fact that she was not fortunate enough to have had a full education. Her thirst for learning and knowledge however stayed with her all her life and she instilled it in me and my brother. I grew up being hardly conscious of a life beyond one that encompassed the mind.

I was born and brought up in Bangalore which is home to one of the premier Science institutes in the country. I was competetive in my school years and was indeed lucky to have had teachers who were very dedicated during my high school. My love for mathematics started early on in my primary school, when I realised that one could do well in this subject by just understanding it! Among my happy memories of the summer vacations are those that I spent in the city library reading and also of the times when we got the text books for the next year. I would quickly try to understand and work through the early math chapters before school started. The other subject we would run through much faster
and more easily was english.

In the late 1970’s, there was no career counselling and information was not as freely available or accessible as it now is. Engineering was not the rage that it is now. However, it was clear that a successful degree in a good engineering college, preferably in computer science,meant that one’s career was comfortably made! There were not many women doing engineering and I was torn between pursuing a degree in the pure sciences and an engineering degree! When I was discussing this with one of my seniors in my pre-university years, he asked me if I liked abstract thinking. I said I loved it and then his immediate response was that I should then continue to do mathematics rather than engineering! This helped me make up my mind and I did not even apply to any of the engineering or medical colleges after my pre-university results were out. I still remember that many of my classmates and friends thought I was crazy, especially as securing admission in the best professional colleges would have been trivial.

I got married before I graduated and then continued to do my Master’s degree in mathematics, by correspondence. I was still unaware that a research career in mathematics was possible, the level of information dissemination was quite abysmal then even in cities! We moved to Bombay and here a few people vaguely mentioned `Tata Institute of fundamental Research’, however knowing little beyond the name! It was a sheer stroke of luck that I chanced upon the advertisement of
TIFR calling for admissions to the Ph.D degree… I did my Ph.D there under the supervision of Professor Parimala Raman and have continued to work there after my Ph.D.

My thesis subject was the algebraic theory of quadratic forms over fields; an area with connections to various other fields in pure mathematics. But in the last decade, I have been working in the area of arithmetic geometry, especially that of elliptic curves. Elliptic curves are very special, with an enormously rich structure, multi-layered, with connections to complex geometry, topology and number theory. From the number theoretic point of view, they are greatly fascinating, being the mysterious arena in which there is so much intrinsic structure, yet with many deep conjectures and open problems! Of course, these days elliptic curves are rather fashionable because of their applications to cyrptography, but their study goes back to a few centuries! How can one convey the purity of structure and the accompanying beauty that one encounters as mathematical problems yield themselves to solutions? The following quotation from Bertrand Russell comes to mind:

“Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty –a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appleal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music,
yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show.”

Mathematics underpins many of the research in the Sciences and also much of the technology.Yet I think that scientists in general, and mathematicians in particular, are not good at promoting their subjects or in conveying the excitement of research! Many bright young students in India get sucked into the Information Technology madness, and perhaps feel frustrated after a few years when they discover that their minds are not challenged enough! The intellectual freedom that academics have is something very valuable. Of course, with it comes the responsibility, frustrations etc, but the challenge, should we seek it, is there, beckoning us constantly. Patience, discipline and rigour, especially in mathematics, are essential in a scientific career. Often, one can spend frustrating days and weeks not seeing the path to solve a problem. When one finally sees it, that joy and the eventual beauty of all parts of the intellectual puzzle fitting together so intrinsically, makes one feel that it was worth all the periods of frustration!Another invaluable facet of an academic career is the collaborative component. It is deeply rewarding to be able to share ideas with other researchers from around the world and work together. Both at a professional level and at a personal level, such experiences enrich our lives and bring people together in a manner that is becoming more and more rare in other areas in today’s strife-torn world!

Finally, I want to say a few words about being a woman in Science. When the Harvard controversy erupted last year (the President of Harvard university is supposed to have made some comments about women being unsuitable for Science), the accompanying discourse rarely touched upon the fact that Society is not yet fully ready for women to be in Science! I am very conscious that in India, women have multiple contextual roles to play, and am also constantly struck by the fact that women do it with dexterity and ease, across the different cross-sections of society! For women, a scientific career
perhaps offers more flexibility in combining a career with a family life. Scientific policies could be shaped towards
making them sensitive to the problems of women. I truly feel that there is a whole new world in science waiting to
be discovered and claimed by women!

Meet Marianne Freiberger

Today we would like to introduce Marianne Freiberger, who is co-editor of the magazine Plus and together with Rachel Thomas and Marc West looks after the day-to-day running of Plus, writing articles and news items, doing interviews, and copy-editing feature articles sent in by our wonderful and generous contributors. Before joining Plus, Marianne did a PhD and then a three year postdoc, both in complex dynamics and both at Queen Mary, University of London.

We have asked Marianne tell us a bit more about the Plus magazine and herself, and here is her answer:

I’m one of the two editors of Plus online magazine (http://plus.maths.org).

Plus is a completely free magazine about mathematics aimed at the general public. We publish four times a year and each issue contains a range of feature articles written by mathematicians and scientists on any aspect of maths and its applications, as well as an interview with a working mathematician. In between issues we publish regular news items and podcasts.

All articles are accessible for anyone with an A level knowledge of maths.

We cover anything from pure maths and theoretical physics to maths in the arts and social sciences, or any other area where maths might crop up.

There are quite a few famous names in our list of authors and interviewees, including Stephen Hawking, Roger Penrose, John Conway, Caroline Series and Cheryl Praeger (who are also in this blog).

 

Plus has been going for ten years now. It is part of the Millennium Mathematics Project (http://mmp.maths.org), a non-profit-making educational initiative based at the University of Cambridge - a great place to be with access to lots of interesting mathematicians! Plus initially started as a resource for school teachers, but soon widened its remit. Today our audience (Plus attracts around 250,000 site visits a month) includes people from all backgrounds and ages and with all kinds of reasons for their interest. Some of our articles require a pen and paper and lots of careful thought, while others can be read in a leisurely ten minutes in front of the computer or in the bath. Some articles require a good background in maths, while others are so simple that they reel in thousands of people who never in their life thought that they’d find maths even remotely interesting - this does happen, and it’s fun when it does!

 

My own involvement in Plus began in early 2005. I was coming to the end of a postdoc at Queen Mary, University of London, where I had been working with Shaun Bullett on holomorphic dynamics. I’d put in a few unsuccessful applications for further postdocs and I was getting grumpy about the prospect of spending a few more years here and there, in places I didn’t really want to be in. I’d toyed with the idea of becoming a science writer, but what I had read about it didn’t sound too encouraging either.

Especially since I hadn’t got a clue about “science”, having always been a pure mathematician who could just about screw in a light bulb. I came across the job ad for the position of Plus assistant editor by chance, applied, and got it. Initially it was only to cover my colleague’s maternity leave, but luckily for me, the then editor left for The Economist, and I got the job for longer (though nothing’s permanent in this game). I was extremely lucky, because I really enjoy it!

 

My job now involves quite a wide range of things. There’s only two of us running Plus, so it’s all in our hands. Firstly, there’s the work of an actual editor: finding authors, liaising with them and editing their work, which can be quite hard given the definition-theorem-proof style of many mathematicians. What I like most, though, is the fact that I get to do lots of writing myself about any subject that interests me. I talk to the mathematicians, do a bit of research, try to get my head around things, and then try to turn them into something accessible and, if I’m lucky, interesting for non-mathematicians. Then there’s the day-to-day running of Plus, including running the news desk, recording podcasts (lots of fun too), organising our writing competition, doing publicity work, etc, etc.

 

My interest in maths popularisation simply comes from the fact that I love the ideas and think that everyone should know about them. It’s almost a cliche, but it’s true: maths is poorly understood and misunderstood by “the public”. Since you’re probably all mathematicians I (for a change) don’t have to go on about why this is a bit of a cultural scandal.

 

What I would like to say, though, is that researchers are hugely important in maths popularisation. Turning the problem around is not just a matter for school teachers or that vast and non-descript thing called the media.

Few subjects are as impenetrable to non-experts as mathematics - half of the time we don’t even understand each other’s work! It takes experts to help translate the jumble of symbols and strange words into something that can be understood by the rest of the world. If academics don’t help, then everyone else loses out.

 

In a sense my work now is the opposite of research: I get to learn about an incredibly broad range of maths, but none of my learning goes very deep.

Just enough to write an article for someone who knows even less. But that suits me. I’ve always been fascinated by the ideas, but bored by the details, and I’ve never been great at coming up with amazing ideas of my own. Having said that, I do miss the research and the time it grants to get to the bottom of things.

 

Women are still underrepresented in maths and this is something I also notice in my work at Plus: the majority of our authors and interviewees are male. We are read by younger people and I worry that the apparent male dominance discourages some of them. So - if you like the idea of Plus and would like to share some of your maths with the wider world, then please get in touch!

 

 

Meet Frances Kirwan

Today we have a great pleasure to introduce Frances Kirwan. 

Frances gave us permission to publish her letter prepared for the publication in the EWM newsletter.

 

Dear EWM members,

 

The editors of the EWM newsletter have asked me to write a letter introducing myself to everyone, as I am the new EWM convenor. I would like to start by saying how pleased I was to be asked to be involved with EWM, as I think it is an excellent institution.

 

My first serious contact with EWM happened when I helped to organise an EWM workshop on moduli spaces in Oxford in 1998, and it was such a refreshing change to be in an audience of mathematicians with women in the majority. Unfortunately I missed the EWM meeting this September, so my most recent experience of being surrounded by women mathematicians was in Princeton in May, when I took part in the Women in Mathematics programme set up by Karen Uhlenbeck, which the Institute for Advanced Study hosts each year. This year the theme was algebraic geometry, where (together with symplectic geometry) my main research interests lie, and it was very enjoyable and stimulating to be there.

 

So what is my mathematical background? Well, I was an undergraduate in Cambridge, and then a graduate student working with Michael Atiyah in Oxford in the early 1980s. That was a very exciting time … there was a group of very lively students including Simon Donaldson (my future husband, Michael, was another), and many visitors such as Raoul Bott (who, very sadly, has recently died), Dan Quillen and Cliff Taubes, who all came for long visits. Next I spent a couple of years as a Junior Fellow at Harvard, which was equally exciting, before returning to Oxford where I have been ever since. I was President of the London Mathematical Society from 2003 to 2005 (not, I am pleased to say, the LMS’s first woman president … I followed in the illustrious footsteps of Mary Cartwright, who was LMS President in the 1960s), and for those two years it felt as if I was spending as much time in London as in Oxford, though in fact it averaged at most one day a week.

 

My research interests are in moduli spaces in algebraic geometry, in geometric invariant theory (GIT), which was developed by David Mumford in the 1960s in order to construct and study moduli spaces, and also in the link between GIT and moment maps in symplectic geometry. At Harvard I was lucky to be able to talk to David Mumford (who at that time was moving away from algebraic geometry towards computer vision, but was still happy to help a postdoc like me) and on the symplectic geometry side to Shlomo Sternberg and Victor Guillemin (at MIT). While I was at Harvard, I was also lucky to receive invitations to visit from two leading women geometers: Karen Uhlenbeck (then in Chicago) and Dusa McDuff (at Stony Brook) … those visits made big impressions on me. After my first daughter was born in 1988 I did much less travelling, though I did take her to Berkeley for a sabbatical visit when she was about six months old. My children are now aged 19, 17 and 15, so they can more or less look after themselves these days.

I spent two later sabbaticals in Australia, which is where my husband grew up.

I found the time difference between Australia and Canada, where my collaborator Lisa Jeffrey is based, very efficient for collaboration by email: I would work on something during the day, email any progress or questions to Lisa in the evening (my time) which was morning for her, and then she would work during her daytime and her response would be waiting for me when I got up the next morning!

 

The EWM’s next get-together will be a half-day meeting on Sunday 12 July, immediately before the European Congress in Amsterdam, organised jointly with the EMS Women in Mathematics Committee. The next general meeting will be in 2009, and Dusanka Perisic (EWM treasurer) has very kindly offered to host it at her University of Novi Sad; it will take place over the four days 25-28 August 2009. So I’ll look forward to meeting as many EWM members as possible in Amsterdam in 2008 and/or Novi Sad in 2009.

 

With best wishes to everyone,

 

Frances Kirwan

EWM Convenor

EWM Mailing Lists

 

Elizabeth Baldwin is a postdoctoral research assistant at the University of Oxford, associated to the Somerville College as a junior research fellow. She works with Prof. Frances Kirwan, and her research is in algebraic geometry; to be more precise, it is in geometric invariant theory and moduli spaces of stable curves and stable maps.

Elisabeth is in charge of EWM mailing lists. We have asked her to tell us something about the lists, and here’s her answer:

The ewm-all mailing list connects European women academic mathematicians, allowing them to advertise jobs, fellowships and conferences, particularly the ones of special relevance to women in mathematics. It is associated with the organisation of European Women in Mathematics.

With around five postings per month, this is not a high volume list. There are about 170 people currently subscribed. Details on how to subscribe are given at http://www.math.helsinki.fi/EWM/info/mailinglist.html

There is another list, ewm-uk, specially designed for women working in the UK, which is used to advertise events of more local interest. Instructions for joining can be found at the same place.

There was a third mailing list, ewm-discuss, but it has not been used in recent years and EWM has decided to promote the blog of EMS Committee to a discussion forum instead.

Elizabeth Baldwin

 

Women mathematicians in contemporary Russia

Natalia Lyulko, who is one of the regional coordinators of the EWM , prepared for today issue of our blog article “Women mathematicians in contemporary Russia” ,  presented at the EWM meeting in Cambridge.

Natalia lives in Novosibirsk. She has been working at the Sobolev Institute of Mathematics as a senior scientific researcher for twenty years, and gives lectures in “Functional Analysis” at Novosibirsk State University. Her research interest are in the field of hyperbolic problems on the plane. Her husband and her two sons (18 and 20 years old) are also mathematicians.

The position of women mathematicians in contemporary Russia

by Natalia Lyulko

Russia gave the world a number of famous women mathematicians. Among them is Sofia Kovalevski - a worldwide known Russian woman mathematician, Barry, Oleynic, Kochin etc. More recently, one of the most prominent women mathematicians was Olga Alexandrovna Ladigenski (1922-2004). She was a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, a president of St. Petersburg Mathematical Society, a professor of Mathematics and Mathematical Physics. She used to be a chair of mathematical department for 50 years, published over 250 research papers, and seven books on the theory of differential equations with partial derivatives and the stability theory of the problems of hydrodynamics. She also became famous for solving problems number 19 and 20, posted by Hilbert at the beginning of the 20^th century.

One can go on and on with famous women mathematicians, but I would like to highlight the position of women mathematicians in contemporary Russia. Nowadays, more than 90% of all mathematics teachers in schools, and about 70% of the teachers in higher learning institutions and colleges are women. Unfortunately, the proportion of women pursuing research careers in mathematics is very small.

I work as a senior scientific researcher at the Sobolev Institute of Mathematics in Novosibirsk Akademgorodok. It was founded 50 years ago by the decree of the Soviet government as a centre of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Science. Right now, it has more than 60 research institutions pursuing studies in different areas: Physics, Geology etc. Institute staff number about 280 employees, only 14% of which are women (there are two scientific degrees in Russia: one that corresponds to PhD and another one that is called a Doctor of Science – which does not correspond to English equivalent). During the last five-year period, the number of dissertations defended by women has doubled, compared to the number in the five-year period prior to that one. Now there are 28 women with PhD degrees working at our research Institute; only two of them hold a PhD of a higher level. One of them was awarded this degree last year.

The researchers about to work for the institutes obtain their education at the Novosibirsk State University. The department of Pure Mathematics has about 1,500 students, 25-30% of whom are women. About 40% of all students in the doctoral program are women; twenty years ago, only 25% of the doctoral students were women. Among the authors of dissertations defended at the University for the last five years there were 48% of women, while there were 18% of women in the Soviet Union during the same period. However, there were only two women in the last 16 years who were awarded a higher PhD, which makes a total of 11%.

One can see that there are very few women mathematicians in our Siberian region, but the number of women mathematicians awarded the PhD degrees at their younger age has doubled recently - compared to the time before the demise of the Soviet Union. The demise, during the 90s, had for its consequence a severe cut in funding of science and education. Naturally, scientific careers became less attractive. Many people adapted to these changes, set off for business entrepreneurship or politics, and went abroad. Women, however, continued responding to a higher call for teaching and researching.

We all know that if a meaningful creative work is to continue, the exchange of ideas and approaches to the solution of new problems is vital. Therefore, back in the 90s of the last century, when the crisis hit science and education, Russian branch of the European Association of “Women Mathematicians” came up with an initiative to establish an organization uniting women in science and education. The goal of the organization was to continue the tradition of Russian science and fundamental education. This organization became known as the Association of «Women in Science and Education». The first conference was held in 1994, and Professor Risnichenko, a Doctor of Mathematical and Physical sciences at Moscow University, was elected as its president. Presently, it is a very active organization; it holds annual conferences “Women-mathematicians”, “Mathematics, Computer, Education”, “and Non-linear World”. The published papers presented during these conferences comprise more than eighty volumes.

Professional branch of this organization is the Association of “Women Mathematicians.” Inna Emelyanova, a professor at Nijniy Novgorod University, has been a leader of the Association since 1993. Until 2004, the Association held annual conferences in Volgograd, Cheboksary, Voronej and Novorosiysk. Now these conferences are held every three years, gathering between 100-150 participants. Women delegates usually present their results of research in theoretical or applied mathematics, exchange professional information and problems, and share the pedagogical experience in doctoral programs. Mathematics, Information Technology, and Education are traditional topics of these conferences. These conferences are a good schooling opportunity for young women who undertake challenging careers in education and research. Publication of papers and theses usually follows the conferences.

In conclusion, I would like to mention the All-Siberian Congress of Women Mathematicians that is held biannually, in January, in Krasnoyarsk. Delegates come from Siberia, Ural, and Far East. The first such conference was sponsored by the “Women in Science and Education”, and was devoted it to the celebration of 150^th birthday of Sofia Kovalevsky. Despite the severe weather in Krasnoyarsk (occasionally it gets down to -40 degrees Celsius), it is becoming more and more popular among women mathematicians. In addition, it is becoming popular among professional mathematicians as well. Among the delegates of the 4^th Conference held in 2006, there were many foreign participants. The total number of the delegates reached 160, and they came from 42 towns and cities. One of the delegates, Lyudmila Demidova Lopuhina, came from Sweden. Her presentation was devoted to the Stockholm period in life of Sofia Kovalevsky. The next conference of All-Siberian Congress of women mathematicians will be held from January 15^th to January 18^th, 2008 in Krasnoyarsk. For more information please visit our website http://www.kongress.a109.ru

Do you know numb3rs?

Lisbeth Fajstrup , an Associate Professor at the Department of Mathematical Sciences of Aalborg University , Denmark, certainly does! She is a fine mathematician and an editor of a hugely popular Danish blog about mathematics. I met Lisbeth at the 13th general meeting of European Women in Mathematics and today you have the opportunity to do so.

Here is Lisbeth contribution

I am very proud to have been asked to contribute to the EMS Committee “Women and Mathematics: blog as one of the “next door mathematicians.”

My first EWM-meeting was in Warszaw in 1993, and I was at the meeting in Trieste in 1997, in Loccum, Germany 1999 and then this year, 2007 in Cambridge. I enjoyed these meetings very much, the friendly atmosphere, the really serious mathematics introduced to the general audience, these wonderful women who all do mathematics and love the subject - I always leave with new energy. So, right now I am wondering why on earth I did not go to more of these meetings, but then again, there were other things asking for my attention.

I was born March 8, 1960 (On the International Women’s Day) in Denmark.
I am married and have two daughters born in September 91, and December 94.
My parents are not academics, but we have always been a family that read books, and I did well at school, in fact in most of the subjects. In high school, I met a wonderful Math teacher and realized that Mathematics was a very different thing from what I had seen in primary school, and I enjoyed it and did well.
I studied at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. Luckily for me, the university or the Math department could not afford to hire students as instructors, which meant that Ib Madsen, who was by then an associate professor, was my Linear Algebra instructor and he followed our “class” as Algebra instructor the following year, and Curves and Surfaces instructor after that. He supervised my master thesis (on Gauge theory and group actions) and persuaded me to apply for a PhD scholarship, which to my enormous surprise, I actually got.
Ib Madsen supervised my thesis as well, and I worked in the area of equivariant stable homotopy and homology theory for some years. In 1995, I went together with my colleague at the University of Aalborg , Martin Raussen, to a conference “New connections between Mathematics and Computer Science” at the Newton Institute in Cambridge, and there I met Eric Goubault, a French computer scientist, whom I and Martin Raussen have been working with ever since in the area of applying geometric and topological methods to problems in concurrency. It is very fascinating to be developing a new area, and also quite a challenge to be working between fields.

Numb3rs:
These days I am very involved in a project related to the TV-series, Numb3rs. It is a CBS-production, which is now on its fourth season in the US. The main characters are two brothers - one is a mathematician and the other is an FBI-agent. And they apply mathematics to solving crime. The mathematics is quite serious and the crime solving part plus the relationship between the characters is so fascinating, that people actually watch the show enough to keep it on the air now for the fourth season. Hence, lots of people hear words like the Riemann hypothesis, Markov Chains, partial differential equation etc., and they do not switch to another channel! It is really well done. And mathematicians are hired as consultants to give ideas and make sure that what they say is correct.

When this was coming to a Danish TV-channel last fall, we decided at my department, that we wanted to give people a chance to learn more about the math from the show. There is already a blog http://www.atsweb.neu.edu/math/cp/blog/
doing this in English, but we find it important to give Danish viewers information in Danish.
So, every Wednesday night at 8 pm I am ready in front of my TV, and when the show stops at 9, I post an entrance on the blog http://numb3rs.math.aau.dk about the math in that day’s episode. This takes quite a lot of preparation, since the mathematics will often be something I don’t know very much about; and even when I do know it, it is not easy to communicate it to the general audience at high school level, which is the target audience for the blog. So, I have to think about it.

In April and May we had 18000 visits on the blog each month, and this is after we subtracted a lot of web-crawlers. Our visitors come from more than 7500 sites each month, so we are quite happy with it. In May, I got money from the Danish National Science Foundation to buy me off some of my teaching in order to give me time to do this. And actually it does take time to do this. But on the other hand, I am learning so much - and I really do enjoy that. Last week, it was Benfords Law, which you can look up in Wikipedia, if you do not understand Danish…
By the way: Searching for Numb3rs in Google gives relevant results because number 3 in there.

Meet Caroline Series

Today we have a great pleasure to introduce Caroline Series

Caroline Series is Professor of Mathematics at the Warwick Mathematics Institute.

In 1986, Caroline, together with Bodil Branner, Gudrun Kalmbach, Marie-Francoise Roy and Dona Strauss, had the idea of starting European Women in Mathematics. EWM is now a well established organization which aims at supporting and encouraging women mathematicians across Europe. Caroline was closely involved in establishing EWM, playing a central role in setting up the organizational and legal infrastructure. She organized the 3rd EWM Meeting in Warwick in 1988. She also initiated related activities both locally and nationally, including British Women Mathematicians Day, now run by the LMS Women in Maths Committee. Caroline was one of the organisers of the 13th EWM general meeting in Cambridge UK in September 2007.

We have asked Caroline to tell us a few words about herself. Here is her answer:

 

The EWM meeting this September in Cambridge was a special occasion, marking the 21st birthday of EWM. I was very happy to meet so many new and interesting people, among them Dusanka who has been working very hard setting up this Weblog. It will give us all a chance to get to know each other and exchange ideas much more easily than before.

Dusanka asked me to tell you something about myself. Rather than write anything now, I thought I would share with you a long interview with me which was done by the magazine Mathematics Today earlier this year.

Here is the interview.

 

Caroline