02 Jul 2021
Note: In January 2021, I interviewed Dr. Carolyn S. Gordon, a famed mathematician and Benjamin Cheney Professor of Mathematics at Dartmouth University. In this post, I present an essay I wrote on her post the interview. Her love for mathematics and experiences as women in STEM were incredibly inspiring!
Chuckling and animatedly ducking to dodge an imaginary flying compass and protractor frisbee, Dr. Carolyn S. Gordon, Benjamin Cheney Professor of Mathematics at Dartmouth College, describes an otherwise unpleasant male-dominated high school memory with as much vitality as she’d talk about whether we can hear the shape of a drum.
Having never met a mathematician before, I didn’t know what to expect before virtually meeting Dr. Gordon; it, however, would be an understatement to say that I was pleasantly surprised. Her zest and passion for mathematics were unmatched, almost palpable even through the Zoom window. This got me thinking: as someone who works with shapes and their geometry, is there a defined shape that Dr. Carolyn Gordon is most like? Spoiler alert, there is – the Gömböc.
The Gömböc is a 3D shape with sharp edges, but once you set it down, it starts wriggling and rolling around with its own will.
Growing up in West Virginia in the 1960s, Gordon was no stranger to the looming gender inequality at the time. She recalls women being classified as either “married women” or negatively-connotated “career women,” with young girls not expected to be thinking about their careers at all. The case wasn’t any different in institutions either: “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to,” blurted out the highest-scoring girl in middle school upon noticing the competitive rage in her male classmates’ eyes after a mathematics exam. Yet, much like the Gömböc, despite the dictated sharp edges and rules around, once in her own space, there was no stopping Dr. Gordon or her mathematical aspirations. Introduced to mathematics as a process of solving puzzles with a strong female influence by her 7-years-elder sister, Gordon pegged mathematics as her “favourite and best subject in school,” knowing she’d want to major in it all along while coming to terms with the fact that females were an isolated minority in mathematical fields, given the dilapidated ratio of 12 boys to 1 girl in her senior year’s accelerated maths class.
The Gömböc is convex.
Gordon went on to attain a degree in mathematics, with faltering career plans but a natural inclination and newfound exploratory interest in abstract maths, from Purdue University. “Girls were still a minority in college, but not isolated,” reminisces Gordon, acknowledging that while quantitatively the gender ratio didn’t get any better at university, she, like other female classmates, finally felt accepted. It wasn’t entirely as rosy though: despite 1 or 2 women on the Purdue maths faculty, she could never interact with a single female professor. However, she still speaks fondly of the faculty at Purdue and one specific professor at that: towards the end of her undergraduate journey, the professor asked her what she thought about graduate school, and even though she hadn’t thought much about graduate school up until that point, it clicked – she wanted to go to graduate school. Much like a convex shape, she moved outwards from the norm: at a time when women in undergraduate maths classes were sparse, Gordon obtained a PhD in Mathematics, under Edward Wilson, from Washington University in St. Louis, where she found a new exploratory lens to look at maths with. Later, Gordon began a postdoctoral fellowship at the Technion Israel Institute of Technology, followed by a professorship at Lehigh University, Washington University in St. Louis, and finally, Dartmouth College, where in 1996, she proclaimed, “You can’t hear the shape of a drum,” and subsequently received international accolades.
The Gömböc is homogeneous (made of a uniform material without any bulges or weights).
Akin to the Gömböc, the essence of Dr. Gordon’s being resonates with one significant notion – promoting women in mathematics. As the former president of the Association for Women in Mathematics and deliverer of the 2010 Noether Lecture, she still looks back on the first AWM event she attended, as a graduate student, with great awe. Until that day, she had never met a female mathematics professor. “Society erodes confidence,” she puts it, and organizations like the AWM help restore it and bring mathematics into public focus. Subsequently, Gordon established an AWM chapter at Dartmouth, and even within her mathematics classrooms, she strives for equality of opportunity and encouragement for all genders.
The Gömböc has one stable and one unstable equilibrium point.
Given that Gordon is a mathematician, it almost goes without saying that mathematics is what brings her stability as her equilibrium; Gordon describes maths as her “refuge,” a haven, throughout, even during times of personal hardship like the passing away of a loved one. From burying herself in the Schaum’s Outline of Calculus in high school, avoiding the competitive boys in class, to using maths as a shield for loneliness in a new country during her postdoctoral fellowship, when an unfortunate recent fire distanced most from the mathematics building, maths has consistently been a fulcrum for Gordon. Yet, a failure in that very fulcrum can create an unstable equilibrium point, which Dr. Gordon has graciously accepted, spoken about, and even offered her own solutions to. She, for instance, accepts imposter syndrome as a reality in academia and within herself, but also tells herself that if she were an imposter, someone would have found her out in the last 50 years.
The Gömböc is a self-righting shape.
Despite failures and difficulties, however, Dr. Gordon is self-righting, too. She recognizes that, even today, female mathematics professors, like herself, have to fight implicit biases – “as a teacher, you get used to the male students volunteering to answer and the female students being quiet” – and must make conscious efforts to develop the confidence of female students. This one quality makes her different from a Gömböc though – with both her stable and unstable equilibriums, Dr. Gordon strives to not only right herself, but others too, so much so that she doesn’t consider her Chauvenet Prize her biggest achievement, but her students’ gratitude.