The Women and Math Program
I am looking forward to the 2009 Women and Math program at Princeton. The irony is that I lived in Princeton for seven years and the only time I visited this program was for the lecture course on wavelets by Ingrid Daubechies.
I felt that mathematics should be genderless and pure; that the only basis for a program should be mathematics itself. I tried to ignore the problems of women mathematicians by pretending they didn’t exist. By the time I realized that I might very well love to hang out with a large group of female mathematicians, I left Princeton.
Can you imagine how glad I was when I got a call inviting me to join the organizing committee for the Women and Mathematics Program last year? I was so eager that I arranged a math party at the Program and gave my own talk about Topology in Art.
What can I tell you? I loved the program. For the first time in my life I didn’t feel like a loner, but rather that I belonged to a group. I also felt envious, because when I was a student we didn’t have anything like this in Russia.
I am going to be on the program this year too. The subject is Geometric PDE. I am so looking forward to it that I’m already planning another math party.
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