Right away it says what fields he worked in and mentions some of his results. The rest of the article goes into a bit more depth about his work and then finishes off with a paragraph about the tragedy in his life.
Her work is described in very vague strokes, "two variable Fourier series" and then mentions statistics, probability, and plasticity... so, what did she do exactly? These are very broad fields! The article does mention the Geiringer equations, but there's no corresponding Wikipedia article about them.
The majority of Geiringer's article is instead taken up by the fact that she was a Jewish woman with relatively very little attention given to her mathematics.
To be clear, I'm not saying that this is a Wikipedia-exclusive phenomenon. The BBC article is also rather "soft", as a popular article must be out of necessity, but for minorities, sometimes they (we?) must deal being talked about in nothing but soft articles. The geek feminism wiki calls this the unicorn law:
For some reason some people are incredibly hostile to this suggestion, but I think the BBC has dumbed down pretty drastically over the years - and this can be pretty easily verified by comparing their output from decades past with today's. Older popular science TV programmes sometimes even had - shock horror! - in depth discussion of actual mathematical equations. By contrast, I watched a Brian Cox space series recently in which I recall a single mention of maths, and that was a few animated formulae floating around a beautifully rendered planetary scene as graphics without real explanation, whilst some dreamy ambient synth music played in the background. There's a massive difference in style, content, sophistication of ideas presented, and density of information. The new stuff poses as educational, but delivers very little proper detail.
Apart from that, I think that surely it would have served this woman's memory far better to tell us the details of what she achieved, and how her work has been built on, rather than making her victimhood the main thrust. I'll bet she'd have preferred to be remembered as a mathematician rather than a victim.
There is some evidence that women scientists are being selectively excluded from Wikipedia. As one researcher put it, ‘Women academics are twice as likely to be nominated for deletion as you would expect from the proportion of women among Wikipedia biographies.’
That doesn't directly explain why the articles that are there would be so shy on information, but it does suggest that people won't spend a lot of work on a topic for which deletion may occur, discouraging people from making improvements.
Talking about minorities is an extension of the human drive to find one's place among other people, which is an extremely high priority in almost everyone's lives. As a result, far more people are interested in talking about minorities (which fulfills a basic drive) than are interested in talking about math. So much so that a very significant fraction of articles related to math or any other topic that otherwise doesn't get a lot of light in the public arena are motivated by the social desire.
"for minorities, sometimes they (we?) must deal being talked about in nothing but soft articles"
Rather than "deal", they could take it upon themselves to improve those articles. Who should be responsible for doing that? You yourself, upon seeing such a "soft" article, could try to improve it. Or send a shout out to the feminist mathematicians reddit group that undoubtedly exists.
Also, comparing your links, the entry for Geiringer appears to be much longer and more detailed. I can not discern from the Remak article what exactly he worked on, either. It mentions "embeddings" and "CM-fields" - how is that better than "Fourier series" and "plasticity"? Maybe you view those articles in a biased way?
Also, "unicorn law"? What the serious fuck? They now count it as oppression that they get invited to talk about "women in open source"?
She may be cool, but she didn't "reshape Mathematics". Wish such articles would come without so much hyperbole.
And as for missed geniuses, there are many missed male geniuses, too, many famously so (even Einstein didn't get a position as a professor at first). They suggest only women are overlooked, which is untrue.
There are also examples of female mathematicians even further back being fostered by famous mathematicians.
She's one of the few true aliens I regard as up there with von Neumann and Einstein, who have some kind of ridiculous direct line of communication with the fabric of reality.
Summary: Woman contributes to mathematics; can't find appropriate academic position because she isn't a man.
As far as the article goes there is a bit about her contribution which is over inflated to, "reshaped maths". This is used as a jumping off point to talk about how she can't find the same work her male counterparts would, skills being equal. Finding out that professors were mostly men in the early to mid 20th century is hardly noteworthy but the article spends some time on it. Finally a bit of commentary by the author about missed opportunities because people other than white men have ideas, too.
The last seems to be the point, but it reads as an attempt to find misery and highlight it, rather than perhaps remembering the woman and her contribution. The contribution the author is really interested in is the failure and the opportunity it presents to make a trite statement about equality of opportunity. All with a click bait title.
If the BBC is trying to build a case that female mathematicians were treated poorly 70 years ago compared to their male counterparts, they would somehow need to show that there wasn't a similar supply of men who made an obscure but significant contribution only to get coldly treated by the establishment (somehow I think there's no shortage). We must be careful to not fall prey to example-ism, building cases out of salient examples instead of evenly sampled trends.
Classic HN baiting; I predict the comments will be over 50% meta-commentary about the title's inaccuracy and possibly something about the principle of highlighting female mathematicians, a sizeable chunk on suggestions for female mathematicians with a larger impact, and very little about Geiringer, her mathematics and her legacy...
It's incredibly unfortunate that you're correct, but I'm also not surprised.
Topics like these on HN inevitability devolve into complaints about the media or attempting to divert discussion into something entirely different (like missed male geniuses). Nevermind the pun people missed in the article title as they immediately jumped to attempt to discredit the entire thing.
[+] [-] jordigh|6 years ago|reply
Look at a Wikipedia article about a relatively obscure mathematician, say, Robert Remak:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Remak_(mathematician)
Right away it says what fields he worked in and mentions some of his results. The rest of the article goes into a bit more depth about his work and then finishes off with a paragraph about the tragedy in his life.
Compare now with Hilda Geiringer's article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilda_Geiringer
Her work is described in very vague strokes, "two variable Fourier series" and then mentions statistics, probability, and plasticity... so, what did she do exactly? These are very broad fields! The article does mention the Geiringer equations, but there's no corresponding Wikipedia article about them.
The majority of Geiringer's article is instead taken up by the fact that she was a Jewish woman with relatively very little attention given to her mathematics.
To be clear, I'm not saying that this is a Wikipedia-exclusive phenomenon. The BBC article is also rather "soft", as a popular article must be out of necessity, but for minorities, sometimes they (we?) must deal being talked about in nothing but soft articles. The geek feminism wiki calls this the unicorn law:
https://geekfeminism.wikia.org/wiki/Unicorn_Law
[+] [-] growlist|6 years ago|reply
Apart from that, I think that surely it would have served this woman's memory far better to tell us the details of what she achieved, and how her work has been built on, rather than making her victimhood the main thrust. I'll bet she'd have preferred to be remembered as a mathematician rather than a victim.
[+] [-] jfengel|6 years ago|reply
Some sources: https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/female-scientists-pages-... https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05947-8
That doesn't directly explain why the articles that are there would be so shy on information, but it does suggest that people won't spend a lot of work on a topic for which deletion may occur, discouraging people from making improvements.
[+] [-] whatshisface|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pksdjfikkkkdsff|6 years ago|reply
Rather than "deal", they could take it upon themselves to improve those articles. Who should be responsible for doing that? You yourself, upon seeing such a "soft" article, could try to improve it. Or send a shout out to the feminist mathematicians reddit group that undoubtedly exists.
Also, comparing your links, the entry for Geiringer appears to be much longer and more detailed. I can not discern from the Remak article what exactly he worked on, either. It mentions "embeddings" and "CM-fields" - how is that better than "Fourier series" and "plasticity"? Maybe you view those articles in a biased way?
Also, "unicorn law"? What the serious fuck? They now count it as oppression that they get invited to talk about "women in open source"?
[+] [-] pksdjfikkkkdsff|6 years ago|reply
And as for missed geniuses, there are many missed male geniuses, too, many famously so (even Einstein didn't get a position as a professor at first). They suggest only women are overlooked, which is untrue.
There are also examples of female mathematicians even further back being fostered by famous mathematicians.
[+] [-] klyrs|6 years ago|reply
You missed the pun.
[+] [-] minikites|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] wolfi1|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pixelpoet|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Koshkin|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sp332|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] concordDance|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sonabinu|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LanceH|6 years ago|reply
As far as the article goes there is a bit about her contribution which is over inflated to, "reshaped maths". This is used as a jumping off point to talk about how she can't find the same work her male counterparts would, skills being equal. Finding out that professors were mostly men in the early to mid 20th century is hardly noteworthy but the article spends some time on it. Finally a bit of commentary by the author about missed opportunities because people other than white men have ideas, too.
The last seems to be the point, but it reads as an attempt to find misery and highlight it, rather than perhaps remembering the woman and her contribution. The contribution the author is really interested in is the failure and the opportunity it presents to make a trite statement about equality of opportunity. All with a click bait title.
[+] [-] whatshisface|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dadarepublic|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] kfalencik|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] growlist|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] krapp|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] sailingparrot|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EliRivers|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fzeroracer|6 years ago|reply
Topics like these on HN inevitability devolve into complaints about the media or attempting to divert discussion into something entirely different (like missed male geniuses). Nevermind the pun people missed in the article title as they immediately jumped to attempt to discredit the entire thing.