Steersman wrote:Since both Stephanie Zvan and Jadehawk would apparently prefer to stand on ceremony rather than have some spirited and useful discussions on their blogs, I never did get a chance to respond to your last comments to or about me there (1), the latter in particular, to wit:
You’re maybe saying “[hyperbolic equations], it’s more of a gal thing�
There are many ways to possibly misinterpret what I said, but that is definitely among the stupidest.
Apart from the fact that my statement was phrased as a question – and largely a rhetorical one at that – and not as an assertion of truth, I should mention at the outset that I think there is some justification for the first part of your previous statement to which I was responding:
Did anybody see that TED talk about hyperbolic maths, crochet, and coral reefs? Turns out mathematicians spent 100 years thinking that there was no way to model hyperbolic equations in the real world because none of them did crochet. Why did none of them do crochet? Because maths are for men and crochet is for women!
And while I haven’t actually watched the TED video yet, I have found the blog of the woman who started that ball rolling – Daina Taimina – and have borrowed the book from the library –
Crocheting Adventures with Hyperbolic Planes – that she wrote on the topic. As I find the mathematics rather intriguing I’ll thank you for that.
However, it seems you are very much mistaken about the “no way to model hyperbolic equations†as it seems mathematicians have been doing so for almost 400 years. For instance, if you take a look at the Wikipedia article on the “pseudosphere†(2) – which is a physically realizable manifestation of the“hyperbolic planeâ€, one with constant negative curvature – you’ll see this:
Just as the sphere has at every point a positively curved geometry of a dome the whole pseudosphere has at every point the negatively curved geometry of a saddle.
As early as 1639 Christiaan Huygens found that the volume and the surface area of the pseudosphere are finite, despite the infinite extent of the shape along the axis of rotation.
I discussed that in some further detail in the Pit (3) – should you wish to brave those environs. But in any case, rather much of a stretch to get to “no way to model hyperbolic equationsâ€, much less to laying any difficulties the mathematicians did have to a lack of familiarity with crocheting. Although that is not to say that that skill can’t have any relevance or value to that science or related ones.
However, what I found particularly objectionable and highly problematic was your barefaced assertion that:
That’s one example of how the exclusion of women slowed down mathematical discovery.
For one thing, one might ask, even if there were as many female mathematicians as there are male ones, what makes you think that those females were necessarily going to be familiar with crocheting? Do all women learn that skill at their mothers’ knees? Is that supposedly an intrinsic female intuition? (Why I asked that rhetorical question. And why the evidence makes it such an untenable position.)
Further, while I will readily agree if not deplore the fact that, in part at least, biology has traditionally tended to exclude women from many pursuits or avenues, to even suggest that argument – that because crocheting has been a traditional female industry or pastime and because that skill has some relevance to mathematics therefore there should be more females in mathematics – is looking rather problematic if not actually sexist. Galileo apparently developed much of his physics because his finely tuned sense of pitch enabled him to make measurements of time that no else before him had thought or been able to do. To argue your case seems rather analgous to arguing that because of Galileo’s experiences there should be more musicians in physics. Neither argument seems particularly tenable for any number of reasons.
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1) “_http://jadehawks.wordpress.com/2013/04/13/a-collection-of-reading-comprehension-fails/#comment-3315â€;
2) “_http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudosphereâ€;
3) “_http://slymepit.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?p=85877&sid=ffeb8ad672a6ccdf1be86813d40a1ab6#p85877â€;