Novelist has Mathematics Question

Question

Renata Eilenberg Panetti is the last survivor of the holocaust. After the war, she moved to New York. earned her a Ph.D. in mathematics, and went on to teach at Columbia. When asked why she chose the discipline she says, "because unlike people, numbers never let me down."

I chose this profession for her thinking this would be a good career for someone who distrusted people and wanted to lose herself in abstraction. Does this notion sit well with real mathematicians?

Also

• Why do mathematicians (you) love math?
• Do all mathematical equations have one correct answer?
• Were there female Ivy League professors in the early sixties?

Thank you for your consideration.

Answer 1

1. I love math because of its usefulness (i.e. computers are pretty nice) and beauty (Euler's Identity, $e^{i\pi}+1=0$), but you could also mention its consistency and reliability.
2. It depends on what you mean by one correct answer. For instance, $x^2=4$ has the solutions $x=\pm2$, but it has a well-defined set of answers. If you consider the set of solutions itself to be an answer, then possibly.
3. Not too many, but yes. As you can see, there were definitely women with Phd's during the sixties.

Also, this should be posted elsewhere on the site, but it is a good question.

Answer 2

I'm a journalist specialized in mathematics, so I interview a lot of mathematicians.

Most of them are very gregarious. They do a lot of alone thinking, but as soon as they have something to show, or as soon as they hit a wall, they rush back to the university to talk about their problems with some colleagues.

Although there’s a lot of shy students in a math college, I’m yet to know a shy teacher or professor or PhD student. (I’ve been writing about mathematics for six years now.) They absolutely love to talk about mathematics.

As for why I love mathematics: it’s the most exquisite mixture of art and science there is. It’s beautiful in a very precise way — the same beauty, I suppose, of a wonderful machine like a Ferrari. Doing mathematics is the intellectual equivalent of hiking in a rough and beautiful backcountry — think of hiking in Denali, Alaska. You have to be resourceful and careful, but the beauty is breathtaking.

About equations: a valid equation may have one answer, some answers, infinitely many answers, or no answers at all. I used the work “valid” because there are invalid equations, like 1 = 0.

Cheers and good luck!

Answer 3

Interesting questions. Some thoughts that may help with your novel:

Once teaching number theory in summer school (at Harvard) there was a woman in my class whose day job was in the psychological counseling service. When I asked her why she was studying junior level mathematics she said "on vacation I like to think about problems that have solutions."

A mathematical equation might have one correct answer, or a set of correct answers. But I think that's the wrong question to ask. Mathematicians don't usually describe what they work on as "equations with answers." Finding and understanding patterns in numbers and shapes and abstractions they invent and then proving those patterns must continue might be more like it.

I've been a mathematician since about freshman year of high school - it just seemed to me the way I wanted to live - I can't really articulate why. I was lucky enough to be able to be paid to do it. I narrowly escaped medical school.

There were no women professors in the math department at Harvard in the late fifties. No instructors either that I can remember. Very few women graduate students and many of them never finished doctorates.

Be sure to read Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture , biographies of Ramanujan, Julia Robinson, Emmy Noether and Sonya Kovalevsky (among other things). You might also want to ask at the Association for Women in Mathematics.

By the way, if your protagonist's name is or was Eilenberg, make sure you explicitly connect her to Sammy Eilenberg, or explicitly say the name's a coincidence.