Top women in mathematics and physics discuss how they got to where they are — and why there aren’t more of them.
For Sylvia Serfaty, mathematics is all about truth and beauty and building scientific and human connections.
In theory, mathematics is neutral – two plus two equals four regardless of what anyone wishes the answer was. But in practice, mathematical algorithms can be formulated and tweaked based on powerful interests.
How many statisticians does it take to ensure at least a 50 percent chance of a disagreement about p-values?
It wasn’t until almost a century after Boole’s pioneering work that the world caught up. Both Victor Shestakov at Moscow State University in 1935 and Claude Shannon at MIT in 1937 proposed using Boolean logic to design electrical switches, the latter’s work paving the way for a major shift in electrical engineering in the USA. By late 1948, Shannon had introduced what we now know as information theory, and digital computers soon followed.
Computers can translate French and prove mathematical theorems. But can they make deep conceptual insights into the way the world works?
When people say they are “bad at math,” they usually mean that they had trouble with algebra, although if you corner them and ask the right questions you can usually make them realize that they use algebra all the time without noticing it. This leads to valid criticisms of how we teach math, but it doesn’t mean we’re a nation of math idiots.
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Emmy Noether's Theorem may be the most important theoretical result in modern physics.
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