KtyL's blog

I was interested in this topic because I was fond of math ever since I had been in elementary school. But after listening to this lecture, something else caught my attention. Dr. Lam's lecture consisted lots of short stories. He showed us some jokes about people who knew nothing about math, and very interesting , these people were often described as women.

There is a strange prejudice agianst women saying that men do far better than women on mathematics. Maybe it's true that few women were outstanding in math and science before, but it was because of that women had hardly any acess to education in the past, and their achivements were rarely recorded. Even Sophie Germain, who made contributions in number theory that eventually lead to the final soluion of Fermat's Last Theorem, and had a great achievement in the elasticity of plate vibrations, were listed not as a mathmatician or a scientist, but a person of private means- a woman having no jobs and being unmarried- after her death.

Maybe there were much more women than we know having great acheivements in fields other than taking care of their own family, but never being recorded?

We can never know about it...