 Fy enw i. Rwy'n ei fwy oedd ymddangos. Fy enw i. Fy enw i, ac yn ymdweithio ar gyfer, oherwydd mae'n cofnod o'r gwheifftyn o'r Fy enw i'r cwrs. Yn y peth gweithio, Beth yw Professor John Barragren o'r lech yn rhaglen. Mae'r rhaglen Llewcian Hudson, a gwnaeth ymdweithio ar gyfer y university. Yn y fyddebolaeth, mae'n ysgolio am fy modwedol a'r ffamilist yn fwyaf George Elliott. Mae'n meddwl, mae'n meddwl yng Nghymru, Sefeir Cofioles Gaiar, felly yng Nghymru, Ffilosofa, Herbert Spencer, yn 1869. Mae'n meddwl yma'r cwyr, felly yn ddweud i'r ffianfodol i'r ffianfodol yng Nghymru, i'r ffianfodol i gael ei wneud i'r ddweud i'r proses a'r ddweud i'r ddweud. Ond yw'n gweithio y bydd y wneud i ni'n gweithio hynny'n mynd, ond mae'n gweithio hynny'n mynd. Dwi'n iawn. Mae'n gweithio'r gweithio yma i'r ymddangos yn ymddangos o syniadau a'r gymhiliad ar y ddefnydd. Mae'n fynd i'n ffyrdd yn ni'n eu cyfnod o'r ffyrdd yma. Mae'n gweithio'r gweithio gyda'n gweithio'r ffrif yma of tonight's events and some housekeeping. Once Professor Rippon has done his introduction, June will deliver her inaugural lecture, and then there will be time for questions for your questions here in the audience, but also from those who are joining us online from social media. We also invite you to engage on social media about this talk, and the hashtag for that is hashtag OU Talks. We're also keen to hear from those of you who will be joining us via live stream, so please use the email address provided, and please keep your comments and questions brief so we can cover as many of them as possible during the question and answer session. This evening's inaugural will end at 7pm, after which we invite you here to join us for refreshments downstairs. Before we start, I'd like to draw your attention to the health and safety details on the slide. It now gives me great pleasure to hand over to Professor Phil Rippon who will introduce June. It's a huge pleasure to say a few words to introduce June. The Open University is very fortunate that June has spent her distinguished academic career here. Starting as a PhD student in the history of mathematics with Jeremy Gray, then going on to a postdoctoral position, then to electorship, then senior lecturer, and now, of course, Professor. The OU has long had an international reputation as a world leader in the history of maths, as many of you know only too well, both for research and teaching with Jeremy Gray, John Favell, and Robin Wilson, and June maintains this reputation today. June's PhD, I'm going to say a few words about that because it was phenomenal. In it she described an astonishing mathematical incident in 1889 around a mathematical memoir by the great French mathematician Henri Poincaré. This essay had won a prize offered by the King of Sweden and Norway. The incident was a highly significant event mathematically and personally for those involved and it had been unknown outside a very small circle until June unearthed it in her PhD. Her book Poincaré and the Three Body Problem described the incident itself and the highly complicated mathematics involved and its consequences and it was praised by mathematical reviews as a superb piece of work. That's your PhD. Since then, June's work has covered the history of maths from the late 19th century through the 20th exploring previously unknown topics such as the mathematical contributions to aeronautics during the First World War and she's often focused on the role of women mathematicians. Her work has been funded by the British Academy and the Centre Nationale de la Recherche scientifique Paris and she spent six months as international research professor at the University of Nancy investigating the work of the great George Birkhoff, a US mathematician who took up where Poincaré had left off. Just a few other highlights, June won a prestigious international prize for her mathematical exposition. She's a former president of the British Society for the History of Mathematics. She is an elected member of the International Academy of the History of Science and a leading figure in the London Mathematical Society. Together with Professor Sir Tim Gowers and Professor Emery Leder from Cambridge, she edited the Princeton Companion to Mathematics, an encyclopedic work covering a vast range of mathematical topics which of course again had excellent reviews. You can see a copy of it upstairs and feel the weight. As you might expect, June is in huge demand to give talks at conferences in all corners of the globe, from the United States to China, India, Brazil and all over Europe. Closer to home she's done many outreach activities based around maths history and she's in demand as an expert contributor to the media such as the story of maths on BBC4 and appearances on Melvin Braggs in our time and also Woman's Hour. June's vast knowledge of the history of maths and her ability to communicate that knowledge has fed into our teaching in many ways. She runs a popular master's dissertation on 19th century geometry and thanks to her undergraduate modules now contain far more historical context than they did formally. Moreover, she's an excellent PhD supervisor currently with a group of three very able and lively students, two of whom I think are here today. And as if all this is not enough, June also runs marathons and she has represented the OU at tennis, badminton and cricket. So I'm looking forward enormously to hearing June's talk. He denies the very existence of a woman mathematician. Well, thank you very much, Phil. I'm not quite sure how I follow that. And thank you all so much for coming. I've got so many thanks, my family, my friends and of course my OU colleagues. And just a few I want to say a few words about. I think when I was doing my PhD it would never have got finished without my friends in the tennis and the cricket club. That's for sure. And of course all my colleagues in the School of Mathematics and Statistics and particularly the historians of maths. My research students Craig, Rosie, Tony, Alison and Bridget and particular thanks to Alison for orchestrating the posters outside. And of course Robin, Robin Wilson, John Favel, the late John Favel, who I miss terribly. And last but absolutely, not least Jeremy Gray, who was my PhD supervisor and has been my sort of intellectual guide. His friendship generosity knows no bounds and I can't thank him enough. So I want to begin by telling you a little bit about how I got to where I am today. Because it does play into the story I'm going to tell. I came from a family that shall we say was a little Victorian in its attitude towards education of girls. And as a result I wasn't allowed to go to university at the age of 18. And I ended up beginning my working life in an art gallery in Old Bond Street. And this is the little story of me going from Old Bond Street to Walton Hall. So I began at Thomas Agnews and Sands in, as I say, in Old Bond Street. And my office there would be decorated with paintings by Rubins or Renoir or Constable or Turner. Fantastic. And I've just chosen one of the paintings that came through Agnews hands while I was there, which is now in the Paul Mellon collection at Yale, this painting by John Singleton Copley of Richard Heber. Because I really like it, I like the painting, but I like the fact that he's an embryonic cricketer and I think I never got beyond being an embryonic cricketer. So I kind of feel I relate to it. But there's another reason I like it, is because I discovered that Richard Heber, when he grew up, he was described as a maniacal bibliophile. And he never purchased just one copy of a book. He always purchased three. No gentleman, he remarked, can be without three copies of a book, one for show, one for youth and one for borrowers. And when he died, his library was about 150,000 strong in books in eight houses and it took, it was dispersed after he died and it took 216 days to sell. So I sort of relate, I mean I haven't got quite as many books as him, but I do like books. So while I was at Agnews, I began to think I still really wanted to go to university. And this relatively new institution, the Open University, sort of came across my horizon. And I thought, oh, that's what I can do. I'm far too old, I was in my mid-twenties, I'm far too old to go to proper university, sort of thing. I'll go to the Open University. But of course I was in an art gallery, I thought I'm going to do an arts degree. So I started off by doing an arts foundation course. And in those days, you had to do two foundation courses. By process of elimination, I thought, oh, I'll do some maths. I kind of like maths at school. See whether I can still do any maths. So I did some OU maths. And some of you might recognise the person there, who I don't know if he wants to identify himself now, but anyway. And of course it was while I was doing the maths, I realised actually that's what I wanted to do. And I was very fortunate that I was able to kind of use my Open University courses and I found a rather enlightened admissions tutor at King's College London. And so I did a BSE in maths at King's. And it was while I was there, I got really interested in the history of maths. And I'll say a bit more about that in a minute. But I finished my degree and I thought that's what I want to do. I want to do a PhD in history of maths. But is it because I dislike being a student? It was so lovely being a student. And also I needed to shore up the finances a bit. So I thought, right, I'll go to the city. I was living in Islington, still living in Islington. And got a job at an American investment bank. Well, it certainly shoreed up the finances. But I realised it wasn't what I wanted to do. I mean, that was the other thing. I thought, well, maybe I'll go there and that will be what I want to do. So I then realised that if I wanted to do the history of mathematics that I wanted to do, I wanted to do 19th century French sort of 1920th century. I needed a bit more maths. So I went back to King's and did an MSc in mathematical physics and then looked around for where I could do my PhD. And in fact, the Open University was the only place that I could do a PhD in history of mathematics in a mathematics department. I was pretty sure I could blag it to the historians if I was in a maths department. But I didn't think it would work the other way around. And it turned out to be just the best possible decision I could have made. I was also very fortunate that when I wrote to Jeremy Gray, I... Sorry, Jeremy. It's the only picture I could find. And I was just so fortunate that Jeremy thought that I was worth putting a punt on. And somehow I managed to get through, as I say, the PhD with a huge amount of help from Jeremy and the cricket and tennis club and then managed to somehow convince the Open University to carry on employing me. So I think my story kind of resonates with the rest of my talk in the sense of, as a girl, I had to struggle but also the fact that the Open University really played a key role even before I came here on a full-time basis. So let me now move on to the real sort of meat of my talk. And I'm going to start with Hypatia of Alexandria. And the reason I'm choosing her, and of course this is a talk about the history of women in mathematics and of course it can't be comprehensive. So I'm just using a few examples and I'm not even going to tell you everything I know about each of the people I'm talking about but I'm just making a few points about each of them, a sort of different point. And so I've chosen Hypatia. Well she was the first woman mathematician that we really know anything about. There's no, of course there's no surviving writings of Hypatia. So everything we know comes through commentaries of later people and so on. But we have pretty solid evidence for the fact that she was the daughter of Theon of Alexandria, she was a philosopher and she taught philosophy and astronomy and it's believed that she wrote commentaries on various other books by Greek mathematicians. She was a pagan philosopher and she was killed by a Christian mob and of course we don't have an image of her so that's hence the lunar crater, Hypatia. So this really is a Hypatia but I just wanted, I've really chosen her because I think it's quite interesting to look at some of the images of Hypatia. So if you go on to the web and you just kind of google around you find some funny, some quite interesting, well there's this one, this mosaic which I couldn't find anything more about other than it was somebody who was giving a lecture or it comes up various times under the name of Hypatia but it's clearly, clearly not her but people think that it's possibly what she might have looked like I guess. And then there's the Albert Haber, well that's probably what people sort of idealise view of a Greek mathematician or woman of that period but the sort of interesting one I think is this one by Charles William Mitchell. I guess it's not how many people would imagine a woman mathematician today draped over. I've always got rather envious of her hair actually, I've always had rather short hair but Charles Kingsley wrote a novel and he described Hypatia in this sort of way. So I think I just want to sort of make the point about how people, what people think about when they, what does the image of a woman mathematician kind of conjure up and we'll see more about that in a minute. Now there is one man who's going to make an appearance and that's Isaac Newton. Well of course Isaac Newton is arguably one of the greatest geniuses that has ever walked the planet and absolutely incredible mathematician, natural philosopher, great of the calculus together with independent of liveness, Principia Mathematica, I really don't need to say much more about that but the reason I've used, I've brought him into the story, there's a personal reason and also the fact that in a way Newton's reputation really was made by the people who came after him to a great extent because he didn't publish his writings, it was very difficult to get him to publish his writings, he wasn't, so he wasn't a sort of self-publicist in that way and we're going to see some women who help to spread Newton's ideas but there was a personal reason for including him because actually I have to thank Newton for my interest in history of mathematics in one respect and it was because I was, when I was at a lecturer at Kings there were, we had a tutorial, a calculus tutorial and the tutor there said, calculus, so we're all sort of sitting there and we know we're doing calculus, Isaac Newton and then he sort of looked up and of course he said, remember this is in the 80s and he said, second nastiest person to come out of Grantham, well, so I don't only have to thank Isaac Newton, I have to thank Maggie Thatcher as well because it just lit, it was like a light bulb moment because I hadn't thought about mathematicians as being nice or nasty and actually mathematicians is like anybody else, I mean you get nice ones, you get nasty ones and Isaac Newton wasn't a very nice one and of course it matters because people in power, Newton was president of the Royal Society for example can influence things and so that maybe I got really interested in the people, the names that were attached to the theorems and the people and I wanted to know who they were and what sort of influence they had so I do have to be grateful to Isaac Newton for being not very nice. So, but also one of the people who helped to spread Newton's ideas was Emily de Chatterley. Now Emily de Chatterley wrote, Voltaire, the great French philosopher and essayist wrote about Emily de Chatterley, she was a great man whose only fault was being a woman but actually it's a little bit disingenuous of me to include that really because Voltaire was Emily de Chatterley's lover and they lived together and I had a laboratory where they did experiments and things and but her great work, Emily de Chatterley's great work was in a translation of Newton's Principia and she didn't just provide a translation, she provided commentary as well and she was responsible for really spreading Newton's word and getting Newton's work accepted in Europe in the 18th century and there's a whole sort of story about that which I'm not going to go into and I also particularly like this portrait by Latour showing her with her mathematical instruments and her books and so on and of course you can see by her dress that she came from an aristocratic family a well-to-do family and of course that was what enabled her in a sense to be able to do her mathematics, she could do it in a sort of private capacity, she couldn't of course be a professional mathematician as a woman at that age in that age and there's another portrait by Latour of someone who's not so well known and I really like this portrait because it's Mamazelle Ferrand she chose to have her portrait painted with her edition of Voltaire's edition of Newton as you know that was her symbol if you like and of course Voltaire's edition was although it's got Voltaire's name on the cover he actually gave tribute to Emily de Châtelet on the frontispiece inside but I think it's interesting when you see these two French women in a similar period showing that actually there was a sort of discourse about Newtonian philosophy in France by women of a certain class of course but they were actually engaging with very difficult mathematics, I mean Newton's penchipure is not an easy read and so actually Emily de Châtelet's work is remarkable and I can't underline that's enough. Another French mathematician Sophie Germain, now Sophie Germain was an autodidact, she learned her maths from her books in her father's library and she became very interested, she wanted to learn more, born in 1776 in 1794 when she was 18 the famous Ecole Polytechnique in Paris opened and she wanted to study mathematics there but she couldn't because she was a woman however the lecture notes were made available for anyone to read so she was able to get hold of a copy of the lecture notes and she began a correspondence with one of the lecturers there Lagrange but of course she couldn't reveal herself as being a woman so she corresponded under the pseudonym of Monsieur Leblanc and eventually the time came when Lagrange was so impressed with what she was doing that he wanted to meet her so they did meet and to Lagrange's credit he wasn't remotely put off by the fact she was a woman and helped and encouraged her with her studies and Sophie Germain did some remarkable mathematics, she won a prize from the Paris Academy for her work on elasticity but the work that I want to just draw your attention to is her work on Fermat's last theorem because she was really the first mathematician to make progress on this problem but after she died and in the sort of decades after her she got slightly sort of wiped out of the history in the sense that it was known she'd worked on it but she was always was always considered that what she did was sort of as an aftermath of what some other male mathematicians or a genre particularly had done and she wasn't really given credit for her own discoveries and that record was only really only put straight in the 1990s when some historians of maths, Americans, Laban Bakker, and Penggili investigated her manuscripts in the Bibliotech Nacional in Paris and actually were able to really see that it was Jamal who had made this major contribution and so I think this tells us also something about how you know we have to be you know as historians we really have to go back to our sources it's not enough just to read what somebody else has written but particularly when the situation is very different as it was in the 19th century and the attitudes towards women mathematicians and we're going to see some more about that in a minute. As I said she described she wrote to Lagrange as a man she also wrote to the great German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss using the same pseudonym and this was what Gauss said when he discovered that she was a woman and he said well how can I describe my astonishment and admiration on seeing my esteemed correspondent Monsieur LeBlanc metamorphosed into this celebrated person yielding a copy so brilliant it is hard to believe and he then goes on to say that number theory which is the branch of mathematics Fermat's last theorem is part of is such a difficult branch of mathematics that it's really hard and so when a woman because of our sex our customs and prejudice encounters infinitely more obstacles than men in familiarising herself with their knotted problems yet overcomes these fetters and penetrates that which is most hidden she doubtless has the most noble courage extraordinary talent and superior genius so Gauss really recognised that actually Sophie Jamal in order to be able to achieve what she had recognised that that was she really was something special but unfortunately Gauss and Lagrange were representative of the whole male society of mathematicians and unfortunately of kind of male society in general there I say at this period. Mary Somerville so we're coming back across the channel and Mary Somerville was a scientist who was very much recognised in her time I want to bring her in because I've got one of my PhD students Bridget Sennhouse who unfortunately can't be here is writing a PhD on her and so I'm learning a lot more about Mary Somerville than I knew before but we do see very kind of glowing accounts of her and I quite like this one by this chap R.M. Beverly who was a bit he was a sort of pamphleteer really and he he wrote pamphlets on the depravity of the students at Cambridge and things like that so no wonder he's actually he considers Mary Somerville the most eminent mathematician of England at the present time so this is 1833 and of course Cambridge was was then and throughout the 19th century what I call the sort of beating heart of of British mathematics but in the first half of well the first two or three decades of the 19th century mathematics in places like the Royal Society were definitely at a low ebb and and there were it it wasn't the sort of high high point I would say of British mathematics then I mean it towards the end of the 19th century and the mathematical physicists kept going and things sort of changed so there were there were lots of sort of things going going on at this time about the role of mathematics and mathematicians and Mary Somerville was also an autodidact and and she contributed to she wrote various books on science as well as on mathematics and the book that I want to draw attention to is the mechanism of the heavens which was published in 1831 and this was a translation with extended commentary of the first two books of Pierre Simon Laplace's great work on celestial mechanics and Laplace's work was the the successor to Newton's Principia so what Laplace did was really sort of add a lot of mathematics and and explanations and things but again very very hard mathematics no diagrams really pretty impenetrable and the British mathematicians were really struggling with what Laplace had managed to achieve and it was Mary Somerville who was able to sort of unpack it and and put words around Laplace's symbols and make it accessible and particularly it was made accessible to the students at Cambridge and that was a great tribute to her for them to accept a textbook effectively by a woman mathematician and I'm include this little sketch of George Peacock as a little bit of self-publicity because I I think it's lovely but B it is actually on display at the moment in the Guildhall art gallery in an exhibition Sublime Symmetry which I've helped to curate so if you're wandering around the city of London and you've a few moments to spare it's free it's a wonderful exhibition and you'll see this lovely drawing of George Peacock by Augustus de Morgan who was the first professor of mathematics at what was the University of London and became University College and then he was the first and founding president of the London Mathematical Society and a very very good mathematician and logician and so on and the other reason I want to include Mary Somerville is because of her relationship with the Royal Society and she was the first woman to publish experimental results in the philosophical transactions of the Royal Society and the first and only woman to have the a bust which was commissioned of her which was placed in the Great Hall at the Royal Society but of course she could not be admitted as a fellow because she was a woman and and in fact the first woman to be admitted as a fellow of the Royal Society wasn't until 1945 and the first woman mathematician was 1947 Mary Cartwright and at the beginning of the 20th century Hertha Ayrton was proposed for fellowship by a number of obviously you have to be proposed by other fellows so all these men a great number of men proposed her but the council turned her down because they said well she's married so she has no status in law so which she can't possibly be a fellow so I mean that this is the kind of institutional barriers that women were up against and I think this is a lovely picture I love this is a picture of Bridget because as many of you I'm sure will know the Royal Bank of Scotland had a public vote as to who they should feature on their recent 10 pound note and Mary Somerville won the vote and Bridget went up to to the sort of HQ of the of RBS and gave a little talk about Mary Somerville and there's a picture of her with a rather large 10 pound note now Ada Lovelace was mentored by Mary Somerville so there's an connection with her there and she's always been attractive to historians of many flavours because she was the daughter of Lord Byron and Byron left the marital home when Ada was only a few weeks old and never returned she was taught sort of basic arithmetic and things by her mother she as you can see from this portrait she also came from a well well to do family and and she married Lovelace and she began a mathematics correspondence course with Augustus de Morgan so I like I kind of sort of think of her as she's a sort of early OU student if you like and what's nice is you can actually read that correspondence for yourselves is now up on the internet freely available and you can see transcriptions of the letters and you can see the actual facsimiles of the letters but of course she's most famous what the thing she's most famous for is her commentary on Charles Babbage's analytical engine the computer that he he tried to build and there's again another sort of story about that but I think the correspondence is interesting because you see her developing as a mathematician and you see Augustus de Morgan as a really patient and effective teacher now um Covela Skyr uh was the first woman mathematician that I really became interested in because she features in my thesis one of her results was important to Poincaré and when I started to read about her I found myself very attracted to her because she wasn't just a mathematician she was a writer she wrote novels and plays and things and she was also being described as revolutionary she was she was a sort of campaign of her women's rights and things um I could give you a whole lecture about her but I'm not going to I'm just going to tell you a few things um just to outline her life to show how kind of um what a pioneer she was um she was born in Moscow uh she wanted to study math she eventually persuaded her family to let her study she again came from sort of minor aristocracy but she couldn't study further maths in Russia and the and she knew she needed to leave Russia in order to carry on her studies but the only way she could leave was this she had a male companion um either father he certainly wasn't going to go brother she didn't have one so the only other thing was her husband um and she was very lucky because at that time there were a bunch of Russian men who recognised this um uh sort of dilemma for women who who wanted to leave and were prepared to marry them um in order to escort them out of the country with no strings attached so it was kind of like a fictitious marriage if you like um in fact Vladimir um and Sophia did consummate their marriage seven years later but at the time he was he was just a travelling companion and she goes to Heidelberg and while she's in Heidelberg she travels to London then she comes back and she's she studies with the great Karl Weistras and does a PhD she's the first woman to get um a PhD in modern Europe she gets um she's championed by a Swedish mathematician called Justo Michagleffler and gets a position in Stockholm not without a lot of opposition Michagleffler worked hard on her behalf and she becomes the first woman to be on an editorial board of a mathematical journal and the first woman to be a professor of mathematics in modern Europe and sadly dies rather young um having caught pneumonia while travelling um but um this is the where the quote comes from which um it's the title of my lecture and um so this is Cobola Skye herself reporting on the incident when she's at George Elliot's Salon and she's and she says George Elliot at once turned to Spencer I'm so glad you have come today she said I can introduce you to the living refutation of your theory a woman mathematician allow me to present my friend she continued turning to me still without mentioning his name only I have to warn you that he denies the very existence of a woman mathematician try to make him change his mind and apparently they discourse for a couple of hours or so and George Elliot was rather pleased with the outcome so she doesn't elaborate further on on what went on in the conversation um but I thought that I would um point out also that perhaps not so well known is the fact that George Elliot um was interested in mathematics so that's why she um she was very pleased to meet Cobola Skye um she she studied mathematics she went um and in fact it's likely that she went to one of um Augustus de Morgan's classes because he taught um at the at the latest college she was friends with um the great um William Kingdon Clifford um and um mathematics appears explicitly in several of her novels and um I'm just going to show you one example of that from the Mill on the Floss which many of you will I'm sure will be familiar with so when Maggie Tulliver visits her brother her older brother Tom when he's at school she realizes that she finds Euclid more interesting than he does so this is Maggie saying Mr Selling couldn't I do Euclid in all Tom's lessons if you were to teach me instead of him no you couldn't said Tom indignantly girls can't do Euclid can they sir they they can pick up a little of everything I dare say said Mr Selling they've a great deal of superficial cleverness but they couldn't go far into anything they're quick and shallow um well of course um George George Elliot could do Euclid and this was a sort of parody of the the kind of prevailing thought about what certain men thought about women but actually if you look through George Elliot's novels you will find um several references to mathematics and there if you uh there are nice some nice articles written um about that um Covela Sky uh fame was widespread um and we see as she made the front page of the illustrated London news when she got her sort of assistant professorship in Stockholm and um one of the things when you there's a lot written about her but when you read the contemporary accounts one of the things that is repeated again and again is how beautiful she is um as and this is always there's a kind of sense of astonishment um and this is kind of captured I think by the remark of the mathematician James Joseph Sylvester's assistant when he saw Covela Sky's photograph because he Sylvester corresponded with Covela Sky and it was absolutely the standard practice you exchanged photographs and he said why this is the first handsome mathematical lady I have ever seen um and so this idea that you know if you were going to do maths you couldn't possibly be you know beautiful or attractive you know there was a sort of clearly people had very fixed in their minds what a woman mathematician should look like and they certainly shouldn't look like Covela Sky'r um so that brings me on to um women in Cambridge um and where I've done a certain amount of work uh so women um really enter Cambridge in the um yeah I'll leave you to read the quote um so Geltan and Unum are founded in so 1870s and women start studying mathematics now up until 1880 they could sit the mathematical tripos but they had to get permission they couldn't sit it by right now the mathematical tripos was the most prestigious university examination in Britain and had been for really the hold of the 19th century it was fiercely competitive I mean horrendous six days of uh you know five and a half hours of of exams day after day after day um really grwling beyond belief but there was such prestige attached to it that many many um men want you know competed to be the top of the list and the top the first class of the um mathematical tripos were known as Wranglers so it's like the first class of university degree now but they were the Wranglers and if you were senior Wrangler that was just um that opened doors to anything it was a passport to anywhere I mean whether you wanted to continue as a mathematician or whether you wanted to go into the church into the law or so on um so there was a huge um uh um people were just amazed when in 1880 Charlotte Scott sat the mathematical tripos and she was ranked equal to the eighth Wrangler and I mean this was beyond what anybody had imagined would be possible um and um she again was reported widely and I should have said that the results of the tripos were also reported widely always in the national newspapers and in local newspapers and so on and I mean she was in very um uh the the company she was keeping as fellow students I mean you can see the senior Wrangler was Joseph Lamor he became Lucasian Professor that was Newton's Professorship Stephen Hawking's Professorship I mean the sort of oldest and most senior mathematics professorship in Cambridge and then the second Wrangler was JJ Thompson who won a Nobel Prize for Physics in 1906 for his earlier discovery of the electron um and so this was a remarkable achievement but how how was it seen in the press um oh before I would just want to show you this just this was to emphasise the the significance of being senior Wrangler when when Joseph Lamor goes home back to Belfast there's a torch-like procession of university students and then there are fireworks there's all kinds of of celebrations that go on I mean one can't quite imagine that happening um now you know when a math student goes home and says well I was top in the you know exams but anyway but um so but how did the press receive Charlotte Scott so this is a spectator just after the results Ms Scott has answered papers papers set for the mathematical tripos in a manner which would have brought her high on the list of Wranglers an achievement of no common kind we hope that the ability which the new system brings out and fosters in women will not be of a kind to give to those who possess it a character for deficiency in feminine gentleness we do not believe that it will be so but even in the rare cases where it is so the world should remember that there have always been women of the masculine type only that they have hitherto lat the means of proving what they could do though possessing amply the means of proving what they could not be so again we get this emphasis on what women mathematicians look like um and again you you can read the reports about um Charlotte Scott but if Charlotte Scott um created um quite uh a bit of excitement um oh well sorry i wanted to just say that she did go on to have a um a distinguished career but not in Britain there was no way she would get a professorship in Britain at this time um she after she did the tripos she um she did stay on and lecture at Gertran for a while um but then there was an opening at Brynmore a new college for women in the United States and she was the founding professor of mathematics there and she went on to have a very distinguished career she was a um wrote uh very good papers in in geometry published books in geometry supervised PhD students and was um uh very active in the American mathematical society but that was a career that just would not have been open to her in in Britain at the time um but as I say if she caused a stir then Philippa Fawcett really caused a stir because 10 years later she was above the senior angler um and that was quite beyond I mean I think people had started to think well maybe women could kind of after Charlotte Scott they were obviously capable of doing um a certain amount but to be above the senior angler and um and we see that the tripos list is reported in the times there and you see the top of the list and it's a bit difficult to see is a dr Bennet well that's you know that's the wranglers and of course the women are not listed with the men they're listed underneath um so although it does say she's above the senior angler she's clearly below um so um and this was a time when women could not get degrees at Cambridge uh women could not get degrees at Cambridge until 1947 I mean it's really quite shocking um and this when Philippa Fawcett um uh became uh above the senior angler that was a push for for people to try and um move and get things changed and of course there were a lot of men who were supportive of women because remember these women were studying at Gertan and Newnham and they had to be taught their mathematics by someone and there were a number of men who went to Gertan and Newnham and the Cambridge lecturers who went to teach them um because of course the women could not go and go into the lectures with the men um so there was a you know it was quite a considerable support but there was not enough it was far too threatening and even in 1920 when Oxford opened its doors to women and gave women degrees we wanted that that was a great argument the Cambridge women thought for them to have degrees but ah the you know it came back no no no if you want a degree just go to Oxford so um you know it was it really was there was such a prejudice um I just can't underline that enough really um and we see Philippa Fawcett was celebrated in the popular press there was a report about her triumph in the New York Times and this was the first verse of a a ditty that was written about her hail the triumph of the corset hail the fair Philippa Fawcett victrous in the fray crown her queen of hydrostatics and the other mathematics wreath her brow in bay um and this is a cartoon from um from punch um where we see her um as the seniora Fawcett because she's seniora than the other wranglers um so moving on to world war one of course things changed for women dramatically during the first world war um because of conscription and the number of men who were um who left to go to the war and there were jobs that were needed to be done by um done by women and there were women mathematicians who contributed to the war effort and one of those women was Hilda Hudson and she came from a mathematical family her father was a mathematics professor her mother had studied mathematics she had a sister who would also study mathematics and was also um a high equal to a high wrangler she quite unusually goes to Berlin to do some studying she's the only woman to give um a lecture at the international congress of mathematicians when it was held in Cambridge in 1912 she she goes over to Brynmore and sees Charlotte Scott and then she gets a job at the West Ham Technical Institute um and then the war breaks out um and she does some war work and I want to draw attention to her because my student Tony Royal has um done some really very nice work indeed on what women the role of women in um uh during the first world war particularly those working in um in the Admiralty and um and within um Aeronautics and um uh she held a Hudson one an OBE for her her work and she published on um uh on the work work that she did so um but of course you can't have a talk about the history of women in mathematics without mentioning probably the most talented women mathematician of all I don't it's hard I don't like really putting somebody right at the top of the pile but it's pretty hard with Emmy Nurtur not to um she her work in abstract algebra as this quote says completely sort of changed it she was daughter of a mathematician um she gave a plin re-address at the ICM in 1932 she was at the University of Gertingen with um with Hilbert and of course being Jewish she was expelled from her position in in Gertingen in 1933 and she then goes to Brynmore and sadly dies young after an operation it was so very unexpected but the um the point about her that I want to run there is an awful lot we could say about her but there are two things one is that in 1915 her theorems on which connect conservation laws and symmetries which is when she did the work were published in 1918 so it's a centenary this year these are incredibly important theorems for physics and the thing that perhaps she's most famous for and there's a meeting at the London Mathematical Society and the Institute for Maths and its applications in September this year which I'm helping to organise so this is just a little another little bit of self promotion here to encourage you to go to that but the thing I want to just show is some work done by my partner Reinhart Sigmund Schulteur who has been working quite a bit on eminata and he's uncovered some new manuscripts and um this is quite an interesting little episode I think in September 1928 the chair of mathematics at Kiel became vacant and um Adolf Frankl who was at Kiel and his friend Helmut Hasse who was at Halla are in the position of discussing the possible candidates the actual decision is made by the ministry the Prussian ministry and so you see them in this correspondence going through the different candidates and when they get to eminata this is how the conversation goes miss netta there is no doubt that as a man she would have received a call long time ago this is Frankl then Hasse says miss netta I'm astonished that you even seriously consider this possibility although I regard her highly in scientific matters I deem her totally unfit to fill a regular teaching position even less so in a small university like Kiel I'm of the opinion that one should not make the experiment to appoint a woman as a full professor at such a place as Kiel the experiment shall we try first on a bigger scale when unsuccessful outcome would not do so much harm um and anybody who knows anything about netta's mathematics will find this really quite astonishing now it has to be said she did not have a reputation as a brilliant teacher but then I guess most of us have also been taught mathematics by and I think I don't think we'd object to being taught by eminata but um but anyway if you want to read more about this is in the most recent edition of the LMS newsletter which is freely being available online um and I think almost finally on the historical part I just want to make just a a glancing reference really to the women co-breakers at Bletchley Park who Churchill famously described as the geese that laid the golden egg but never cackled and that description applies really absolutely to Margaret Rock and I suspect there are not many people who have heard of Margaret Rock I mean we've all heard of Alan Turing and we've heard of um you know a number of mathematicians there but Dilley Knox who was in charge of the cryptography department at the beginning of the war described Ms Rock as the fourth or fifth best of the whole enigma staff and quite as useful as some of the professors now I think one of the reasons that we don't know about her is because she she never cackled she never ever told her own story um so it's really difficult to know what what she did do and of course I think this is true of probably quite a lot of women mathematicians now I'm not for a minute trying to say that there were as many brilliant women mathematicians as there were men or anything like that but I'm just saying that I think there are still many stories to be uncovered and many roles that women played in mathematics that have yet as I say the stories have yet to be told and I think there's a responsibility on us as historians to try and uncover them and to tell those stories and to encourage the next generation of of women by by telling those stories um so coming right up to the present day um a wonderful event happened in august 2014 Maryam Merzikhani won the Fields Medal now the Fields Medal is what people loosely describe as the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in maths the um the the main difference is that you can't win a Fields Medal unless you're under 40 now that of course conspires greatly against women particularly if they've had time off to have a family and so on but it was wonderful that Maryam Merzikhani won the Fields Medal tragically even at the time she had cancer and she died um last year um but she's a fantastic kind of role model inspiration for women mathematicians of our generation we have the next ICM because the Fields Medal's always presented at the international congress is in Rio this summer so we're all hoping that the committee the prize committee will find another woman who will also blaze a trail as Maryam Merzikhani did um so just to conclude I just want to kind of give you some figures about the um what the the place of women mathematicians in the UK today it's a bit difficult to see this but we see at degree level this is unfortunately it's quite difficult to get up to date figures but so this was the situation in 2011 that 56 percent male 44 percent women that's not so bad but then when you go right to the other end um in 2011 um and you get to professors 94 percent men and uh six percent women and so we have what's called the leaky pipeline of um it just gets less and less women um we do have a bit more um some information a bit more recently so in 2016 um you can see that the um percentage of women has gone up to nine percent so um in real terms it's only a three percent increase but it's a kind of like a fifty percent increase on what was before so you know we're making progress but it's still um very very slow and it should we need to do more um and of course there is work being done um and um there's a very important work being done by the London Mathematical Society and particularly um it's Women in Math Committee which was chaired for several years by um Gwyneth Salod who's here um and who was rightfully awarded the OBE for her work in supporting women in mathematics um and the committee won the Broad Society Athena Prize for the work that they've done and um the Athena Swan Charter which was established in 2005 um is a way of encouraging mathematics well scientific departments to um address this question of the leaky pipeline um to help women progress to senior roles and the um school of maths and statistics here been awarded the Athena Swan uh bronze award and and Gwyneth has chaired that committee and I'm very I was very pleased to be a member of that committee and along with my student Tony Royal as well um um and we're now kind of really pushing forward and hoping we'll get a silver award next time so there is there is a lot of good work being done but then still needs um to be a lot more um and I would just encourage all of you to um to engage with this particular issue um and that's my final slide. Taking the wonderful applause for an excellent inaugural lecture. Thank you very much perhaps you'd like to join me for taking some questions. Thank you very very much for that so now is the time I think we've got some some time for your questions here and of course for those of you who joined us online so please uh if you could indicate if you want to ask a question or make sure a microphone gets to you perhaps you could kindly say who you are and where you're from so the mic is coming your way are there any other questions I need to take into account so we can get the mics over to you quickly okay excellent I'm not sure if I'm not sure if I should introduce myself Lucian because we've had their email communication about other matters but anyway um John Pearson I used the tutor MA290 uh and I regret that there is no sort of replacement history of maths course in the university at the moment because it was a very enjoyable course to teach and it's it's sad to me that um there is no sort of replacement now and as we have a professor of history of mathematics it would be nice to actually have students at the undergraduate level as well. Thank you for that question John. Yes well I mean it's a great sadness to all of us I mean sadly it's you know to do with the way the curriculum has evolved we do have a history of maths course at the PhD master's level in the dissertation um the only thing another bit of shameless publicity um the MA290 course is being rewritten or has been rewritten by Robin and Jeremy and me into book form and the it's the first volume is at the publishers the second volume should be at the publishers not quite um and hopefully the first volume will be ready by the end of this year so um and we've we've um as you will know with that course it had a reader and we're kind of incorporating the um the extracts from the reader into the into the volume so even if we can't actually teach undergraduates we will have a resource for undergraduates. Take a question from you Paula. Okay so this is from questions are coming online. Yes so this is coming from social media and just briefly June thank you very much for that lots of warmth and really welcoming comments coming in from online and also for your her story joke Lucy and lots of love for that too. Is it serious and tender? Oh I know yeah so from Sundesh on Facebook what has been the greatest shift in attitudes towards women in mathematics in the last 50 years and what was the catalyst for it? Um well I think I think the greatest shift has been really coming through initiatives things like the women in maths committee at the London mathematical science the recognition of the the leaky pipeline I think really before then people just kind of carried you know it was sort of somehow expected well you know that there weren't so many women well there weren't so many and suddenly people were actually this is a huge resource we're really missing out on and we need to do something to address this issue of um sort of implicit bias really I think I think it's it I think it wasn't that a lot of men particularly in the last 50s weren't excluding women it just they it was a bit of a boys club and we all know how clubs work um and so it was it was a need to it was a bit like you know at um you know those gentlemen's clubs in st james's you know sort of um it was actually kind of recognizing the problem and then looking um ways of addressing it and I think we can see that the fact that the numbers are edging up um and that with the particularly with the Athena swan um charter that that has really galvanized people and I think one of the things that's really going to be the game changer is when the funding bodies stop giving funds to departments that don't have the Athena swan charter so actually people really have got to engage with this issue um and realize as I say that they're they're losing a great resource thanks very much for that Paula any other questions yes there's one oh yeah there oh yeah well a couple of take a question there and we'll get to the question at the back so hello uh i'm Barney i'm June's nephew um wonderful talk um when I when I studied um the history of archaeology I saw a similar issue where you had um women very underrepresented for a long time but now that has reversed and women are very well in fact overrepresented um mathematics seems to have um severe so it seems to have somehow developed severe structural issues that have prevented mass taking on a similar trend um why do you think these structural inhibitions have lasted longer than than in other fields um that's very interesting Barney I didn't actually know that was the situation in architecture um I think um I think one of the reasons I think for um mathematics particularly is that if you're doing research in mathematics then you really need to be able to have a kind of continuous go at it and if you for some reason stop like for example having a family or something somebody else might actually prove that theorem that you've been trying to prove and I think it's a kind of slightly unusual thing about maths whereas in other disciplines um particularly to say for me as a historian of math people know that I work on Poincaré or Birkhoff and if I go off and away for two or three years people still know that's my turf and they don't because there's plenty of other turf to dig up but I think and maybe that's the case in archaeology but in maths it isn't you know people um if you miss out um on a period of time and so that is I think one of the really big things that um all these moves towards um as I say with Athena Swan and so on uh trying to address that so that actually if women do have time out they're kept in the loop and there are things that are done that to enable them to continue their research. I think we're taking take one at the back there um yes hi my name's excuse me my name's Manjia um I was just wondering in your work if you've come across um any women of colour in history in mathematics in say India or China or somewhere like that and what's the situation of women of colour in mathematics today? I personally haven't I know I have colleagues who've worked in this era in in the states actually in particular and of course you'll probably many of you are are aware of the film Hidden Figures which really shows very dramatically um how women of colour as mathematicians were really not um appreciated um but I haven't um in my in my own work come across and I have done some work on the sort of mathematics in India from the sort of colonial perspective um but and there certainly there were Indian mathematicians so male mathematicians who who came over and studied here but I haven't come across and this was um the period I was looking at was the late 19th century uh your friend said but I didn't come across any women and of course there's the famous story about Ramanujan and and so on for that for the you know the men's story as it were but um but I think actually there certainly has been work done on that but I'm afraid I haven't been the person who's done it. Thank you. Did you say Carol does a question? On there? Okay thank you. Hi my name is Bashar Nusabi I'm from the computing and communications department. I was wondering you mentioned Ada Lovelace who um who is very well known in computing circles as one of the founders of computing and I wonder if if if you can say something more about the relationship um the evolution of mathematics into applied fields like computing which might address some of this issue that you were talking about um where where in a sense they can solve sort of they can be founders in the field and and and sort of uh and and perhaps make bigger contributions um my instinct is that we're still also having problems in computing as well getting more women into computing and I and I'm just wondering whether it's a discipline issue or or or just a general problem that we have in society. Yeah well I think that the story the computing story is rather different actually because of course initially computers were people um and um and they're often they were women because it was just doing a lot of um uh sort of arithmetical calculations and often it would be piecework so so you get women in that sort of computing I mean Ada Lovelace is certainly sort of a singularity if you like um because of her insights that she had when she wrote about Babidiz analytical engine I mean that's what's so remarkable because of course this machine was never realised but she she could see the potential um and you know she came from that class where she was able to to do that and she went to sort of suares with Babidz and people like that um but but you know you all know better than I do about the kind of evolution of computing as a discipline um I think you know the story is different and when computing starts as becomes more um as a discipline within an academic environment you get more women initially into it until men um kind of come and take over the asylum if you like um and um and and so I think I think it's a very different story and again it's not a story that I've really really worked on but again there are people certainly who have worked on that. Any other questions before I've got a question of my own? Jude can ask you this question with all your study you've brought really brought it to life it's sounds very inspiring to you and to all of us hearing those stories about all these women who've made such an achievement in their day um have you formed a view as to what the combination of qualities um most of them have to have had to been successful in their day and does that serve as any sort of indication of what kind of combination of qualities a woman might need to have now either who's studying mathematics and wants to make you know advances or is considering um studying mathematics um the the the the sort of real answer I mean particularly for that women of the 18th and 19th century the really most important thing for them was to have men to champion them you know the fact that they had fathers who supported them um in their endeavours to do mathematics and when you see the same with um Charlotte Scott and Philippa Fawcett and things their their family environments were such that they weren't prejudiced against women um it was just the kind of the majority of society was um and I think that's that's really the case and particularly the women in the earlier period where you you certainly had to be from a certain class to be able to afford to study but again you didn't have the entree as I've said into the professional arena um so I think it's hard to um to draw anything in that respect but of course having said that these women still had to really work hard to prove themselves and they had to I mean even though their parents were supporting them um or maybe their brothers or whatever there were still people within their social environments who would not you know so they they would be still fighting their corner and I and I think you know women mathematicians today you know still have to fight their corner sometimes um but but I think I think the climate you know has has of course it's changed um but we I think women just need to be you know out there and spreading spreading the word and saying you know actually you don't have to be a woman of the masculine type to do mathematics you know um and um and that there's absolutely no difference in ability between men and women to do mathematics and you know we understand that we recognize that now and we have to make sure that everybody understands and recognises it thank you a brilliant way to end the evening around another round of applause please thank you June uh there are of course opportunities here at the OU to study the curriculum related to June's topic so there's some relevant courses listed on the slide displaying now this is just one of the many topics that the open university engages with our next inaugural is making new ways of organising out of the old by professor Richard Holty who's a professor of professional learning at the OU's faculty of business and law and details on the OU research website home page thank you very much all of you for joining us here um and at home or wherever you happen to be this evening and please join us for those of you are here downstairs for drink and a safe journey home afterwards thank you very much