Mathematician donates Wolf prize money to Bir-Zeit

The algebraic geometer David Mumford, one of the three winners of the Wolf prize this year, is donating his share of the prize money to Birzeit University – a Palestinian university, and Gisha — an organisation that promotes Palestinian freedom of movement. From the Haaretz article:

“I decided to donate my share of the Wolf Prize to enable the academic community in occupied Palestine to survive and thrive,” Mumford told Haaretz. “I am very grateful for the prize, but I believe that Palestinian students should have an opportunity to go elsewhere to acquire an education. Students in the West Bank and Gaza today do not have an opportunity to do that.”

[...]

“The achievements I accomplished in mathematics were made possible thanks to my being able to move freely and exchange ideas with other scholars,” he said. “It would not have been possible without an international consensus on an exchange of ideas. Mathematics works best when people can move and get together. That’s its elixir of life. But the people of occupied Palestine don’t have an opportunity to do that. The school system is fighting for its life, and mobility is very limited.”

–IP

Want my kiss!

I’ve had glandular fever.  That’s mononucleosis, for you transatlantic kids.   And I didn’t even kiss anyone!  Waaaaaaaah!  Sob!  Not.  Fair.  Well, I kissed the Existentialist, but he didn’t have glandular fever.  Although he may well have it now, by reason of having kissed me back.  It seems the incubation period prior to symptoms for this deeply annoying virus is 4-6 weeks.   So profuse apologies to any of you out there whom I have not kissed but nevertheless shared the love with, so to speak.

Anyway, I’m shattered.  I mean, I’m used to being tired, but I’m not used to having used up my daily spoon budget by 11 am and needing to go back to bed before I can face, you know, doing anything.

Anyway, my old flat is cleaned, my new kitchen cupboard is stocked, my bills are paid, and all I have to do now is…write a mega Haskell program in two days, catch up on 3 weeks’ worth of reading, and plough through the preparation for my dissertation.  Easy peasy lemon squeezey.

I think I’m going to go inject some caffeine, and in the meantime, you should read Sarah’s excellent post on education, qualifications, and snobbery.

–IP

Maternity leave for high school students

Students are requesting maternity leave from a Denver high school:

Pregnant students in a Denver high school are asking for at least four weeks of maternity leave so they can heal, bond with their newborns and not be penalized with unexcused absences.

The request is unusual in Colorado’s public schools, where districts tend to deal with pregnant students or new moms with specialized programs or individualized education plans.

Denver Public Schools has no districtwide policy, leaving it up to schools to work out plans for students to continue their education.

Two counselors from East High School approached the school board last month, saying the policy at their school is unfair and inconsiderate because it forces new moms to return to school the day after being discharged from the hospital or face being charged with unexcused absences.

In a lot of US high school districts, a certain number of unexcused absences leads to automatic disciplinary action, including detention, suspension, and failure.  So in practice, the accumulation of unexcused absences often forces many high school mothers to drop out of school — a state of affairs that is utterly inexcusable, in my humble opinion.

 Teen mothers face a challenging future, with many dropping out. A third of teen moms receive their high-school diplomas and 1.5 percent get college degrees before they turn 30, according to the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy.

Well those numbers are pretty telling.

(Hat tip to Bitch PhD, who got it from Lawyers, Guns, and Money.)

–IP

An observation of debatable import

Have you ever noticed anything about the names academics and teachers pick for their example characters in papers and handouts? “Example characters” being those pseudonyms picked for examples or word problems, as in:

Alice has 5 marbles. John has 12. Charlie has 17. How many marbles do John, Alice, and Charlie have altogether?

Some people give feminine names to half(ish) their characters, and masculine names to the other half(ish), as in the example above. Others give masculine names to all or nearly all their characters.

Most university academics in the US and UK that I have encountered use only Western names, such as Ann, Fred, Kate, George, etc. My school textbooks were a bit better on cultural diversity of names. There were Western names, and also names like Parvati, Rajesh, Jorge, etc.

What, if anything, does this indicate? I don’t want to make a huge meal out of it, but part of me can’t help thinking that the tendency to “normalise” Western men, when it occurs, is somewhat indicative of a general social trend.

I do remember thinking, as a child, “Why do they put these weird names in my math textbook? Ann or Bob would be easier.” It didn’t occur to me that most English-speaking Westerners probably think my real name is “weird”. It also didn’t occur to me that math textbooks can teach more than just that. And it didn’t occur to me that the Parvatis and Rajeshes and Jorges in the class shouldn’t have to feel they’re weird.

When you’re writing examples, you pick the first name that comes to mind. I am rather surprised to think that there are people who can write a whole paper full of examples, and never once think of a feminine or non-Western name. I also wonder if the people who make half of their examples feminine and half of their examples masculine do so out of a deliberate attempt to be egalitarian, or do so without thinking about it.

Sometimes in my science lectures, I can’t help noticing gendered language. I’m sure it’s not deliberately gendered, the vast majority of the time. It’s interesting that it works out that way though. And I do wonder how much of that is that women simply are largely invisible to those particular academics.

–IP