POWER IN NUMBERS: The Rebel Women of Mathematics

Non-Fiction

Perhaps not so impossible

POWER IN NUMBERS:
The Rebel Women of Mathematics

By Talithia Williams, PhD

224 pp. Race Point Publishing

Reviewed by Diane Diekman

Talithia Williams wrote Power in Numbers: The Rebel Women of Mathematics to give back. It fulfills her dream of making participation in mathematical sciences a reality for more women, by showcasing these role models and thanking mentors such as the ones who helped her. Williams was a high school student when her math teacher told her she should major in math in college. “It was the first time an older white man affirmed my intellectual ability,” she writes. “Even though I never saw myself as a mathematician, he saw me as one. The conversation changed me. It changed my life.” She went on to earn a master’s degree in math at Howard University and a PhD in statistics at Rice University, where she was the only female and the only African-American in her class.

Power in Numbers tells the stories of female mathematicians from the fourth century until the present. Williams chose thirty subjects who “shattered stereotypes, pursued their passions, and persisted even when things got tough—even when people told them they couldn’t do it. Many were alone on their journey, but with every female who enters the field of math, it makes it easier and more achievable for the next one, and the one after that.”

The stories are grouped into three sections: “The Pioneers,” “From Code Breaking to Rocket Science,” and “Modern Math Mavens.” Most of the women faced discrimination. Annie Easley, before becoming a NASA rocket scientist, was once cropped out of a photo of her team displayed at an open house. She earned a bachelor’s degree in math in 1977, even though, Williams writes, “NASA paid the undergraduate tuition of her male colleagues—and allowed them paid leave to study—but she had to pay for the courses herself and take unpaid leave.”

Mary Winston Jackson made history as NASA’s first black female engineer. Not allowed to enter the cafeteria, she had to order her food through a window and eat at her desk. Katherine Johnson began working in the segregated “Colored Computers” section at Langley laboratory in 1953. In 1970, she helped calculate the trajectory that brought Apollo 13 safely back to earth after its failed mission. President Barak Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015.

NASA mathematician Dorothy Vaughan calculated the trajectories for Alan Shepard’s flight into space and the 1969 Apollo flight to the moon. Concerning the discrimination she endured as a black woman, she said, “I changed what I could, and what I couldn’t, I endured.” Jackson, Johnson, and Vaughan were portrayed in the book and movie, Hidden Figures.

Power in Numbers is a coffee-table-style book with glossy pages and numerous photos of historical treasures, buildings and cities where the woman worked, and family photos. Sidebars explain dynamical systems, quantum mechanics, wavelet analysis, and the difference between a rocket and a missile. Source notes suggest further reading on the women profiled.

The stories are interesting and easy to read, although the topics discussed are way over the head of this non-mathematician. Williams simplifies the information as much as possible for the ordinary reader. The intelligence, determination, and dedication of these women are overwhelming. Their doctoral dissertations include esoteric titles such as “New Types of Irreducibility Criteria,” “Tight Closure of Parameter Ideals and F-Rationality,” and “Behavior of Different Types of Automata and Tuning Machines on Infinite Words.”

In 1874, Sofia Kovalevskaya of Russia became the first female mathematics PhD in Europe. As a child, she had neglected her other studies in favor of math. When her father ended her math lessons, she read a borrowed algebra book after everyone was asleep. Mildred Edgerton Merrill, in 1886, became the first woman in the United States to earn a PhD in mathematics. She was not allowed to interact with the male students or attend lectures. She studied the course text alone and spent long lonely nights on the telescope. In 1943, Euphemia Haynes became the first African-American woman to earn a mathematics PhD.

Shakuntala Devi, the daughter of a destitute circus performer in India in the 1930s, could calculate cube roots at the age of five. Known as “The Human Computer,” she eventually wrote children’s books and puzzle books.

Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, who retired from the U.S. Navy in 1986 at age 80, led the team that developed binary computer code in 1949 and the COBOL computer language in 1959. When a moth caused a malfunction in their computer, the terms “bug” and “debugging” were born.

These are only a few of the many fascinating stories in Power in Numbers. “The one thread they all have in common,” Williams writes,” is that at some point on their journeys, someone believed in them; someone made them think the impossible was perhaps not so impossible.”

These rebel women of mathematics will inspire future generations to realize their intellectual potential and career dreams, no matter what adversities they encounter. I highly recommend this book, not only to those interested in the history of computers and the space program, but those who encourage higher education for all.

~Diane Diekman is a retired U.S. Navy captain who grew up in South Dakota and currently lives in Sioux Falls. Her biographies are Live Fast, Love Hard: The Faron Young Story and Twentieth Century Drifter: The Life of Marty Robbins.