Music

SciTech The centuries-long fight for gender equality in maths

Caitlin Painter

Maths is an inherently maledominated subject. Hundreds of years of discrimination means there are considerably fewer notable female mathematicians in history than male, and explains why we are still seeing fewer women involved in maths at a high level even now.

Two years of a maths degree has taught me almost nothing about female mathematicians. Out of the hundreds of theorems and results I have used so far, only one has been named after a woman: Noether’s Theorem. I was so excited about this that I put a picture of Emmy Noether into my lecture notes. She is, however, a rarity in the world of maths.

Two years of a maths degree has taught me almost nothing about female mathematicians

The majority of content taught at an undergraduate level is well over a century old, and most of the names I come across daily belong to white male mathematicians from the 17th , 18th and 19th centuries. This is a feat almost unique to maths. Year upon year, a new cohort of students are taught the same material necessary to have a comprehensive knowledge of mathematics, most of which was discovered by men. Diversifying the curriculum to include the work of more female mathematicians is not straightforward, as the majority of the maths they are noted for is beyond the scope of an undergraduate degree.

But why were the fundamentals of mathematics predominantly discovered by men? Europe was the centre of mathematical research for hundreds of years, with countless important results originating there from the 17th century onwards. However, Europe at this time was steeped in sexism, particularly regarding the education of women. Many institutions discouraged or even banned women outright, resulting in the few female mathematicians we know today having to go to extraordinary lengths to learn and research mathematics. Sophie Germain (1776-1831) assumed the identity of a former male student to study at the École Polytechnique in Paris, an institution that did not admit women until 1972, almost 200 years after Germain studied there. Germain revolutionised the study of Fermat’s Last Theorem and adopted the same male pseudonym to write to Gauss about her findings. She revealed her true identity after years of correspondence, stating she feared the “ridicule attached to a female scientist”.

It is only through wider reading and research that I have discovered the names and important legacies of these women. Emmy Noether’s famous theorem describes the conservation of physical quantities for actions with symmetry, and is often cited as the most beautiful result in mathematical physics. Whilst Noether was able to procure a degree in mathematics in her own name, she was denied an official lectureship at the

Emmy Noether (Wiki Commons) University of Göttingen on the grounds of her sex. Instead, she taught unofficially for no pay by advertising her courses under the name of a male colleague.

27% of undergraduates and 21% of postgraduate researchers in the Durham maths department are women

The lack of exposure to female role models in maths, both historic and current, must surely impact the number of women who choose to pursue it further. In 2014, Maryam Mirzakhani became the first and only female recipient of the Fields Medal, the highest award in mathematics. Whilst her accolade is groundbreaking, the fact that the 59 other recipients are men highlights the modern-day gender disparity in maths. What does this mean for the current generation of aspiring female mathematicians?

The decrease in women’s participation in maths is alarmingly high. With insufficient inspiration, encouragement and advice, the gender imbalance becomes larger at each stage of progression. Females accounted for 29% of A-Level Further Maths students, and for the current academic year, 27% of undergraduates and 21% of postgraduate research students are women in Durham University’s maths department. Furthermore, the HESA reports that 22% of maths academic staff in the UK are female. Contrary to these figures, there is no biological reason for men to be better at maths, yet they have flourished whilst women have been left in the minority. Whilst the percentage of girls who pass GCSE maths is higher, research undertaken by the OECD found they have a lower maths selfconcept than boys of the same ability. The reasons for this are largely unknown but could stem from negative gender stereotypes imposed from a young age.

Mathematics’ rich history means the social barriers in place for females hundreds of years ago are still having repercussions now, despite discrimination being far less explicit. How much talent has been lost over this time by limiting mathematical research to only a fraction of the population? Breaking such a deep-rooted system is difficult, and I too am still witnessing these repercussions. Transitioning from a very inclusive school to the predominantly male world of university mathematics highlighted this to me. It seems as though we are in a cycle that has yet to be fully broken by each generation.

What does newly discovered Antarctic life tell us?

Cameron McAllister

Immobile life has been found on a boulder embedded in the sea floor beneath 900 metres of Antarctic ice shelf, challenging our ideas of life in this harshest of environments.

The life, including stalked sponges, non-stalked sponges and other unidentified creatures, was found accidentally when scientists sunk a borehole through the Filchner-Ronne ice shelf hoping to obtain a sediment core sample from the seabed. Instead, they crashed into a boulder around the size of a washing machine. When they sent their GoPro down the hole to investigate, they encountered an alien-like world that has shocked scientists. Prior to this finding, scientists had theorised about what life may live under Antarctic ice shelves based on just eight boreholes drilled for geological and glaciological studies, giving a combined observed area comparable to a tennis court. This is despite the fact that almost a third of Antarctica’s immense five million km2 continental area is sea floor beneath ice shelves.

Working with this limited data, mainly just from two of Antarctica’s many ice shelves, scientists had assumed that the diversity of sea life decreased when travelling from the open sea to further beneath the ice shelf, mainly because of the nutrient decrease caused by life under the ice shelf being unable to photosynthesise. Far from the ice shelf front, it was predicted that only the occasional mobile organism, scavengers and predators would be found.

This discovery could teach us lots about possible life elsewhere in the universe

Analysis of the GoPro footage by Huw Griffiths of the British Antarctic Survey, published in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science, suggests otherwise. Over 260km from the nearest open water, the organisms identified in the footage are immobile and feed on organic matter suspended in the cold, dark water.

This is even more astounding when ocean currents are taken into account; the strong currents in the region mean their food, possibly dead plankton, must travel between 625km and 1500km before being eaten.

The boulder organisms could be formed from larvae which have travelled with ocean currents deep under the ice shelf or, more interestingly, specialist life could have evolved to exploit this specific ecological niche. Given the huge extent of this strange habitat, the latter is very much possible.

Boulders become lodged in the ice shelf during its formation when ice from Antarctica’s interior flows over the land before settling on the sea to form a shelf. Boulders are lodged in the base of the ice before eventually falling down to the seafloor. These dropstones are eventually covered in sediment, raising the prospect that these organisms may ‘island hop’ from stone to stone, like the hydrothermal vent communities that ‘hop’ between active vents. Next, researchers need to find out more about the dropstone organisms and their frequency beneath the ice shelves. Future studies might exploit the relatively new technique of environmental DNA (eDNA) sampling (previously covered in Palatinate), which collects DNA that has been shed by organisms into the environment, providing a telltale sign of their presence. This could help researchers work out whether or not the species are newly discovered specialist organisms or known organisms that have strayed much further than expected.

Some sub-ice shelf life is believed to perform chemosynthesis, and such life could be another source of nutrients beneath the ice sheet. Chemosynthesis is, like it sounds, similar to photosynthesis, but with a vital difference: it uses the oxidation of inorganic compounds, such as hydrogen sulfide, as a source of energy rather than sunlight. Chemosynthetic bacteria are common in cold seeps, regions of the ocean floor where hydrogen sulfide, methane and other fluids seep out of fissures in the seafloor caused by tectonic activity.

Chemosynthesis has been proposed as a possible basis for life on other planets, but some chemosynthetic organisms already seem very alien. Tubeworms that grow near hydrothermal vents lack a digestive system but contain – in an organ called a trophosome – chemosynthetic bacteria.

These bacteria produce amino acids – the building blocks of proteins – and release them to the tubeworm. If chemosynthesis is playing a role in the ecosystem of the dropstone then this sub-ice shelf habitat could teach us lots about how life elsewhere in the universe, devoid of sunlight and even oxygen, might function.

Alien? (Dr Huw Griffiths/British Antarctic Survey)