A Tenacious Explorer of Abstract Surfaces | Hacker News Reader

A Tenacious Explorer of Abstract Surfaces

simonsfoundation.org

96 pointsVarcht24 comments

A minor point, the article says that Hypatia of Alexandria was killed by Christian Zealots which is true except it was for non-religious reasons but rather political and it was in a city and time where public political executions were common. Maybe some women have had difficulty with their math, not in my experience but maybe elsewhere, but not Hypatia, she was not killed for her mathematics.[1]

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypatia#Death

After reading the wikipedia article, I'm not convinced that her scholarly life had nothing to do with her murder. In fact, it seems to have played a pretty crucial role.

e.g. we can ask "why Hypatia?" given that there were plenty of worthy targets of public outrage, and Hypatia probably wasn't even the post powerful.

Well, the wikipedia article suggested that it was because they believed she was responsible for Orestes's "unwillingness to reconcile with Cyril". That suggests they were provoked by the content of whatever she was saying to Orestes so if it had been for anything mathematical or philosophical, it was not recorded that way but I don't think there is a lot of evidence to go that route.

Here is a blog post by a historian about a movie that dealt with the subject, if you have the patience to read through it all. http://armariummagnus.blogspot.com/2009/05/agora-and-hypatia...

The big speculation was whether it would be Mirzakhani or Sophie Morel, in number theory (Langlands program etc). So now we can start betting on the next round of Fields medals: will Morel be next?

Another thread with very remarkable discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8169367

Also also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8170640

Correlation does not equal causation but the first thing that stands out to me among these two articles today about Mathematicians who've won Field Medals is their tenacious appetites for literature of all sorts as children.

I think it's incredibly important to note the diversity of subjects consumed and the importance of literature in these children's upbringing.

I think Stanford's undergrad college admission's essay prompt asking about "intellectual vitality" says it best.

I'd generalize your point to these mathematicians having such intellectual vitality from an early age and demonstrating it or pursuing it in some way or another. This is distinct from developing this vitality later in their childhood.

My girls enjoyed my reading this article to them :)

for those interested to see the kind of language that is used to develop her ideas ... here's a taste

http://arxiv.org/pdf/0811.2362.pdf, Counting closed geodesics in Moduli space (PDF)

A fine explanation of her work and trajectory for the intelligent nonspecialist: http://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20140812-a-tenacious-...

Thanks. Since the posted URL (http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/08/13...) is news that was prominent on HN yesterday, we've changed the url to this much more substantive article, which wasn't.

Great stuff and nice idea! I subsequently found that the discussion on the previous article included this and profiles of the other winners from the same site. Great site in general.

This is a much better link. I posted the original with the the thought that there was some irony that all of the top news articles on the subject (as rated by google news) were completely without substance as to Maryam's accomplishments and only were pointing out that she was a women that does some stuff with curved surfaces. I thought the conversation might follow my observations.

I have to say that I admire Maryam very much. I love her tenacity and abstract approach.

Why not call it the Fields Medal?

This is a quirk of HN posting policy: to use the original article title.

Except when it's misleading or linkbait. That one was arguably misleading, though with the quotes not so much.

Edit: the title was "A woman wins ‘Nobel Prize of math’ for the first time". We changed the article to the more substantive simonsfoundation.org piece about Mirzakhani.

The "Nobel Prize for Math" makes the significance of this prize more obvious to the people that don't yet know about it.

I agree, but it also made me click not because it was a woman, but because it made me think a Nobel prize for math suddenly exists (didn't notice the quotes.) I was actually disappointed.

Why does the WaPo use different colored fonts for different sentences within certain paragraphs?

It's about time. There seems to be hard evidence that girls are better at math than boys, on average. Hence, all other things being equal, more than half of world-class mathematicians should be female. I wonder how that applies to programming.

All other things are not equal.

The winners are on the edge of the bell curve. Averages are meaningless.

That's an interesting observation and I do see your point.

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