Comment by jordigh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jordigh | Hacker News Reader

While I don't doubt that Geiringer did a lot of important work, I'm a little frustrated with how difficult it is to read about that work itself.

Look at a Wikipedia article about a relatively obscure mathematician, say, Robert Remak:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Remak_(mathematician)

Right away it says what fields he worked in and mentions some of his results. The rest of the article goes into a bit more depth about his work and then finishes off with a paragraph about the tragedy in his life.

Compare now with Hilda Geiringer's article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilda_Geiringer

Her work is described in very vague strokes, "two variable Fourier series" and then mentions statistics, probability, and plasticity... so, what did she do exactly? These are very broad fields! The article does mention the Geiringer equations, but there's no corresponding Wikipedia article about them.

The majority of Geiringer's article is instead taken up by the fact that she was a Jewish woman with relatively very little attention given to her mathematics.

To be clear, I'm not saying that this is a Wikipedia-exclusive phenomenon. The BBC article is also rather "soft", as a popular article must be out of necessity, but for minorities, sometimes they (we?) must deal being talked about in nothing but soft articles. The geek feminism wiki calls this the unicorn law:

https://geekfeminism.wikia.org/wiki/Unicorn_Law

For some reason some people are incredibly hostile to this suggestion, but I think the BBC has dumbed down pretty drastically over the years - and this can be pretty easily verified by comparing their output from decades past with today's. Older popular science TV programmes sometimes even had - shock horror! - in depth discussion of actual mathematical equations. By contrast, I watched a Brian Cox space series recently in which I recall a single mention of maths, and that was a few animated formulae floating around a beautifully rendered planetary scene as graphics without real explanation, whilst some dreamy ambient synth music played in the background. There's a massive difference in style, content, sophistication of ideas presented, and density of information. The new stuff poses as educational, but delivers very little proper detail.

Apart from that, I think that surely it would have served this woman's memory far better to tell us the details of what she achieved, and how her work has been built on, rather than making her victimhood the main thrust. I'll bet she'd have preferred to be remembered as a mathematician rather than a victim.

(Public) TV used to be much more intellectual in several countries (including my own, Hungary). Partially because there weren't so many alternatives to compete with. The managers could afford to not care about dumbing it down and people watched it in lieu of more gratifying things.

Clickbait and instant gratification is now the norm and if you don't keep up, you just won't be able to attract enough viewers. Now theoretically publicly funded channels and publications could just ignore viewership/readership numbers, but their management style has also become much more commercial.

"Who wants to be a millionaire" used to be incredibly popular in many countries (it was huge in Hungary). In that show sometimes half a minute is just a person thinking in silence, staring at some question about medieval history or about an opera. How many people would watch this nowadays?

Thing is there were plenty of programmes on TV when I was younger that would have had a tiny viewership even back then, and were shown as they fulfilled the required 'boring but worthy' percentage of the BBC's output - these have almost all disappeared to be replaced by facsimiles that pretend to be the same thing but are nothing close.

There is some evidence that women scientists are being selectively excluded from Wikipedia. As one researcher put it, ‘Women academics are twice as likely to be nominated for deletion as you would expect from the proportion of women among Wikipedia biographies.’

Some sources: https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/female-scientists-pages-... https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05947-8

That doesn't directly explain why the articles that are there would be so shy on information, but it does suggest that people won't spend a lot of work on a topic for which deletion may occur, discouraging people from making improvements.

That could also be explained by feminists aiming to list as many female academics as possible, so perhaps they are also likely to list many who are less noteworthy.

It would be surprising if there was really a bias to delete entries about women, as actually Wikipedia is assumed to be under SJW control.

Talking about minorities is an extension of the human drive to find one's place among other people, which is an extremely high priority in almost everyone's lives. As a result, far more people are interested in talking about minorities (which fulfills a basic drive) than are interested in talking about math. So much so that a very significant fraction of articles related to math or any other topic that otherwise doesn't get a lot of light in the public arena are motivated by the social desire.

"for minorities, sometimes they (we?) must deal being talked about in nothing but soft articles"

Rather than "deal", they could take it upon themselves to improve those articles. Who should be responsible for doing that? You yourself, upon seeing such a "soft" article, could try to improve it. Or send a shout out to the feminist mathematicians reddit group that undoubtedly exists.

Also, comparing your links, the entry for Geiringer appears to be much longer and more detailed. I can not discern from the Remak article what exactly he worked on, either. It mentions "embeddings" and "CM-fields" - how is that better than "Fourier series" and "plasticity"? Maybe you view those articles in a biased way?

Also, "unicorn law"? What the serious fuck? They now count it as oppression that they get invited to talk about "women in open source"?

Fourier series and plasticity are very broad fields. They're almost top-level classifications in the MSC subject index. Remak's article mentions topics that are much more specific. Although to the uninitiated it may sound just as obscure, saying someone worked on complex multiplication fields tells a mathematician much more than saying they worked on Fourier series.

The unicorn law isn't oppression; it's just tiring and an annoyance. We are all more than our genders and ethnicities, so it gets tiring to only get asked about those.

I don't understand why this makes you angry enough to curse. Do you understand why?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com