Studies on the Gender Problem in Math

Several new reports on the reasons for the limited numbers of women in mathematics... Here are an eclectic collection of issues that ought to be good reading for teachers, and parents of female students.
Mostly they differ by who they blame:
Blame the teachers...
This first one has been around for awhile, and points to the need to provide strong math teachers for elementary students.
Believing Stereotype Undermines Girls' Math Performance: Elementary School Women Teachers Transfer Their Fear of Doing Math to Girls, Study Finds (Jan. 26, 2010) —

Blame the Parents: "Dads have a major impact on the degree of interest their daughters develop in math. That's one of the findings of a long-term University of Michigan study that has traced the sources of the continuing gender gap in math and science performance."

Blame the culture... "Girls around the world are not worse at math than boys, even though boys are more confident in their math abilities, and girls from countries where gender equity is more prevalent are more likely to perform better on mathematics assessment tests, according to a new analysis of international research."


I am reminded of an old Earth Day Poster from Walt Kelly,

Rhythm and Reasoning Go Together?

An interesting story out of the Karolinski Institute in Sweden indicates another connection between music and intelligence, sort of.....

"Researchers at the medical university Karolinska Institutet and Umeå University have now demonstrated a correlation between general intelligence and the ability to tap out a simple regular rhythm. They stress that the task subjects performed had nothing to do with any musical rhythmic sense but simply measured the capacity for rhythmic accuracy. Those who scored highest on intelligence tests also had least variation in the regular rhythm they tapped out in the experiment."

Here is another quote about the study that seems to go against some of what we have been told about the relation between brain structure and intelligence,

"They also demonstrated a correlation between high intelligence, a good ability to keep time, and a high volume of white matter in the parts of the brain's frontal lobes involved in problem solving, planning and managing time.

"All in all, this suggests that a factor of what we call intelligence has a biological basis in the number of nerve fibres in the prefrontal lobe and the stability of neuronal activity that this provides."

The study appears in 'Intelligence and variability in a simple timing task share neural substrates in the prefrontal white matter', Fredrik Ullén, Lea Forsman, Örjan Blom, Anke Karabanov and Guy Madison, The Journal of Neuroscience, 16 April 2008. But I got my information from an article at Science Daily.

Halmos, Full Stop

As long as I'm mentioning things on this date, I should add that this was the date in 2006 that Paul Halmos died.

Halmos always protested the common view that held mathematicians were "number crunchers" and proposed that mathematics was much closer to art.

His description of how to do (and learn) mathematics is still the best advice I could give my students.

" Don't just read it; fight it! Ask your own questions, look for your own examples, discover your own proofs. Is the hypothesis necessary? Is the converse true? What happens in the classical special case? What about the degenerate cases? Where does the proof use the hypothesis?"

He was also the originator of IFF for If and Only If... and the use of the tombstone symbol to indicate the end of a proof.

"The symbol is definitely not my invention — it appeared in popular magazines (not mathematical ones) before I adopted it, but, once again, I seem to have introduced it into mathematics. It is the symbol that sometimes looks like ▯, and is used to indicate an end, usually the end of a proof. It is most frequently called the 'tombstone', but at least one generous author referred to it as the 'halmos' ".", Paul R. Halmos, I Want to Be a Mathematician: An Automathography, 1985, p. 403.

Happy Birthday, Bud, You're Still on First

October 2nd was the birth date of showbiz legend Bud Abbot, who should always be remembered as the great straight man in one of the great showbiz acts of all time... How could we ever get to the point where this isn't funny.. enjoy.