Mathematics, Mountain Climbing, and Being a Mentor to Women in a Male-Dominated Field

Women have been studying mathematics for thousands of years — Hypatia was teaching in Alexandria in the fourth or fifth century AD — but the discipline has struggled to shake the male stereotype. In 2016, only 28.5 percent of doctorates in mathematics and statistics in the United States were earned by women, according to the National Science Foundation. That same year, the American Mathematical Society reported that only 25 percent of the hires for mathematics positions requiring a doctorate were women.

But that perception might be changing. Perhaps the best recent evidence of progress was the announcement in March that the Abel Prize, which amounts to a Nobel Prize in mathematics, was given to a woman for the first time. The winner is Karen K. Uhlenbeck, 76, an emerita professor of mathematics at the University of Texas at Austin and a visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, N.J. She won for what Robbert Dijkgraaf, the institute’s director, called “her transformative work across various mathematical disciplines, from minimal surfaces to gauge theory, and for her foundational contributions to the field of geometric analysis.”

It might be difficult to understand the mathematics, but her contributions as a mentor in her field are clear. Uhlenbeck spoke with The Chronicle about her love of the outdoors, the challenges of being a woman in a male-dominated field, and coming to grips with her success.

Could you try to explain your work in lay terms?

My work is not all in the same subject and about the same thing, but I basically study partial differential equations.

I was one of the people who developed a method for looking at a problem that was posed on a large scale and then interesting things happened at very small scales, and so you develop a method of looking at a very small scale and studying what happens.

I’m in the realm of finding small and interesting geometric features in the universe.

I heard you love the outdoors. What do you like to do? And is that connected at all to your work in mathematics?

There is a connection. Growing old in mathematics is a little bit like growing old and pursuing these outdoor activities. When I was young, I used to climb mountains and go backpacking and do all that. Now that I’m older, I look for nice little pretty hills to climb. And I think that’s the way I do my mathematics too. I was looking for high mountains to climb and ambitious projects to undertake, and now I’m more looking for pretty little hills that I can enjoy.

I have to admit that one has regrets that one can’t do the things that one did when one was 20 or 30 or 40. But I still enjoy things.

Maybe there’s a lesson in that, that those smaller things can be just as pleasurable.

Yes, I think that’s right. Smaller things can be quite enjoyable.

You’re the first woman to receive the Abel Prize. Have you often been the only woman among your peers?

Yes, but no longer. I started college in 1960, a few years after Sputnik. Many programs were trying to entice Americans into mathematics, and these programs did include women and minorities. But at that time there were laws where women couldn’t have certain jobs. There were a lot of doors that were closed to both women and minorities.

Certainly for women, in the wake of the women’s movement of the ’60s and books like Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, consciousness came of the unfairness and the — in some sense — pure stupidity of these laws.

So I’m really in the beginning of the time when women could expect to progress in a reasonable, ordinary fashion to get a job as a professor.

The assumption was that when the legal barriers were removed, that women and minorities would march through the doors and take their place in academia. Well, this did not happen so simply. Later on in my career, when I had achieved something, I looked around and said, Where are all the other women? So I became involved in mentoring and encouraging women. It’s been a slow process, but thank goodness things are better.

I don’t have very many women friends my age and older, but you know, a few years behind me there’s a big group coming along.

Was it difficult to get a job as a professor when you were starting out?

Certainly. By the time I came along, I had very good recommendations, I had a lot of good people looking after me, so it wasn’t impossible. I don’t want to go through a blow-by-blow description of being told that I should go teach at a women’s college or all that stuff. The less said about the difficulties, the better.

You were told to go teach at a women’s college?

Oh, sure.

You wrote once that you had difficulty coming to grips with your own success. What do you mean by that?

Oh, I have a lot of difficulty coming to grips with my own success. I can’t believe it.

Let me just say, the point and time in which it was the most difficult was when I was asked to give a talk in 1990 to the International Congress of Mathematicians, which meets every four years. It was in Kyoto, Japan, and I was the second woman. The first woman was Emmy Noether, in 1932.

Here I am, a woman giving a talk to the International Congress, and Emmy Noether was the only one who did it before, and it was almost 60 years ago.

Since then, by the way, there are a lot of other very distinguished, very capable women around — Dusa McDuff, who is a chaired professor at Barnard, and Ingrid Daubechies, who’s been president of the International Mathematics Union — so I’m not alone anymore.

Was there anything that helped you come to terms with your success?

Having other women around. First of all, I have to say that throughout my career, I’ve had a series of male mentors who’ve been wonderful to me. But I think the thing that makes me feel best is to see the success of the other women. That makes me feel just much more normal.

You helped start a mentorship program for women.

Here in Princeton, at the Institute for Advanced Study. I think it was 1993. I had been involved in starting Park City Mathematics Institute, which is a summer school. I had expected to see a lot of women show up, and actually we had very few women.

Then the Institute for Advanced Study took over the Park City program. Basically they gave me the money and the fantastic secretarial help to actually organize this mentorship program with my collaborator at the time, Chuu-Lian Terng.

It was hard work, I have to say. A lot of men did not want to send their women students to this program. They didn’t believe a program for women would be of any use to them. But the fact that I had a big name helped a great deal.

Why didn’t they think a program for women would be useful to their students?

That was the mentality. The attitude was, “You should stick to your mathematics and not think about such things.” And, “Our graduate program was the best thing that ever happened to you, and you shouldn’t actually need to go anywhere else.”

Now these programs are accepted. They’re run everywhere. But this was actually one of the very first scientifically rigorous programs for women offered by an elite institution.

You’ve also written that to be a role model, “what you really need to do is show students how imperfect people can be and still succeed.” What do you mean by that?

Everybody finds that they do things wrong, that they don’t get something, that they can’t do something, that there are difficulties, that they get discouraged. I don’t think it’s just women or people who are not at the top of the class — I think everybody has these insecurities.

This business of being a real live flesh-and-blood person with real live flesh-and-blood insecurities, inabilities, frustrations, all those things, that’s actually really important.

Nell Gluckman writes about faculty issues and other topics in higher education. You can follow her on Twitter @nellgluckman, or email her at nell.gluckman@chronicle.com.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.