The Tenth Muse

by Catherine Chung

  I was so focused during those last years of college that I never really fell in with a crowd or made another intimate friend—but I told myself not to be sad about that. I decided my people were not in college, but still out there waiting to be found and to find me. They were the ones who knew—or could discover—secret things. I would find them and discover secret things of my own.

  Chapter 7

  I WAS ASKED TO GIVE A TALK AT MIT IN 2005, AFTER LAWRENCE Summers, then the president of Harvard University, gave his infamous speech on the natural abilities (or lack thereof) of women in the sciences. I agreed, happy to return to the place where I’d received my graduate degree, and exasperated—not for the first time—by the remarkable arrogance of a smart man. In his speech, Summers had speculated that women might lack “the science gene” and then wondered out loud whether it explained why there were far fewer successful women than men in science.

  I had known Larry for at least twenty years by then, and when I heard what he had said, I wanted to go and find him and shake him by his ears. Setting aside all the research negating what he’d said, just simple common sense, I would have hoped, might have made him consider other factors first: for instance, how women hadn’t been allowed the same access to education historically, to say nothing of societal pressures even to this day for women to behave in a certain way and pursue marriage and family above everything else.

  Summers’s speech was a poorly argued, lazy analysis based on historical prejudice in lieu of rigorous study, and while he was duly punished for it, I couldn’t help but wonder why so many intelligent men aren’t more embarrassed to speak on topics they know nothing about, or why anyone would listen to an economist on such a matter in the first place. How are they so sure of themselves, and why are so many people so eager to listen? I’ve always wished I had the confidence to speak with half the conviction on subjects I’m actually competent to discuss.

  In any case, the talk I was invited to give was organized in response to Summers’s remarks, and I was asked to talk about my career and the history of women in math as well as the challenges facing women today. The event was widely publicized in the furor that followed Larry’s speech, a furor which struck me as hypocrisy because the notion that women are inferior at science has long been a sentiment widely held and firmly defended in the Academy. If anything, it seemed to me that the furor and outrage over those remarks had been manufactured to camouflage that fact.

  As I stood at the podium waiting to begin, I looked out at the auditorium into the faces of so many women, their faces upturned, both young and old—and my legs suddenly went unsteady. Over the years I’d grown accustomed to giving lectures to audiences that were almost exclusively made up of men, and now I was surprised by the impulse to tears. I had to breathe quickly and blink several times before I could speak.

  I held the edges of the podium tightly, and as I stood there, the memory of the evenings I spent as a child sitting next to my father operating our ham radio came powerfully back to me. I had always thought that my father’s gadgets and experiments were his own hobbies, projects he wanted to take on for his amusement alone, and it wasn’t until the middle of that talk—so many decades later—that I realized these were things he’d done for me, so that we could share the experience together, so we could have those moments that, in part, helped turn me into a scientist.

  I remembered now the feeling of hope that had coursed through me when we sent out our first signal, waiting for some response—any response—and not knowing from where or when or if it might arrive. Afterward, the question we most often came upon and the question we most asked was: Are you there? And after a lifetime of solitude as one of the only women in my field, it took my breath away to look out at the audience and see the answer to a lifelong question: Are you out there? Are you listening? Am I alone?

  I KNOW NOW, of course, that I am not the only woman to have felt alone for much of her career. That is one of the sad hard facts for many women pursuing careers in science—or any male-dominated field, for that matter. The first time I visited Harvard was in 1963. I had just started graduate school nearby at MIT, and when I stood in front of the hallowed buildings of Harvard grown over with ivy, I thought—What beautiful places men have built for each other with the intention of keeping women out. And my joy at being there was diminished by knowing that this was a place that was meant in fact to exclude me.

  “Hypatia,” I said under my breath that day, as if her name was an incantation, a magic spell. Hypatia was a woman born between AD 350 and 370 and had been a mathematician, philosopher, and astronomer who became the head of the Platonic school at Alexandria. She had been born to a famous scholar father, and as she grew, she overtook his reputation, becoming both the leading mathematician and leading philosopher of her time. She is the only woman in history of whom such a claim can be made.

  She worked to preserve Greek mathematics and philosophy during a time of immense conflict between the Christians, Jews, and pagans; she was a Neoplatonist who championed the belief in an ultimate underlying reality that could only ever be partially grasped through science and human thought. She drew enormous, diverse crowds and taught that the purpose of life was to deepen our understanding of this underlying reality. She famously declared herself married to this endeavor, and vowed to remain a lifelong virgin. At first, Hypatia seemed destined to happiness—beloved by her friends and the public, a woman of noted virtue and beauty and brilliance, who wielded rare influence and power—the only woman allowed to set foot into the Senate. But like many women who rise to unknown heights of celebrity, she was destined for a quick and brutal fall.

  In the political struggle that arose between church and state in Alexandria, Hypatia was branded a pagan for her belief in science and learning, and when Cyril, the bishop of Alexandria, banned Jews from Alexandria, and Orestes, the governor, condemned this, it was Hypatia, as a friend and advisor to Orestes, who was thrust into the center of the bitter conflict. A forged letter in which she decried religion was circulated; rumors and testimony began to spread that she was a satanic witch. And so Hypatia, celebrated for years as a shining virgin, a paragon of virtue and learning, fell from grace for the very same reasons and was pulled from her carriage one afternoon by an angry Christian mob.

  In my mind I see Hypatia sculpted in marble, as untouchable and white as the Greek statues I’ve seen in photographs and museums. But she was not marble: she was flesh and blood, mind and spirit. The book she wrote has been lost. None of her papers remain. But reports of what that mob did to her have endured. Her countrymen gathered around her, and pulled her from her carriage by her hair. On the street, they swarmed her body; with tiles from the roofs of nearby buildings, they peeled away her skin, strip by strip. They claimed their trophies eagerly—each clump of hair, each ragged piece of skin—then set her limbs on fire.

  Hypatia of Alexandria. All that is left is her name.

  Chapter 8

  THEY SAY YOU NEVER FORGET THE FIRST TIME YOU SEE the woman you’re meant to marry, but I would have remembered you no matter what.” That’s what Peter Hall said to me once, when we still thought that one day I’d be his wife. In any case, at that time in my life, being remembered wasn’t a problem. In fact, I’d be shocked if any of my classmates didn’t remember me—every single person who attended our orientation, down to the last man. I was the only woman in our entering class of graduate mathematics students—a skirt in a sea of pants.

  I’d won the inaugural Emmy Noether Award for a paper I’d published in my last year of college on invariant theory, and along with full funding and a living stipend for five years, I was also written up in the campus paper and interviewed by a local radio show in the first week after my arrival. This was a great honor, of course, but for a long time both this prize and Noether’s name were a painful subject to me.

  Perhaps I should have been grateful that such an award existed at all, for “a young woman of extraordinary promise wishing to pursue a
career in science.” But back then I was the only young woman in my year studying mathematics at my university, and though I was grateful for the award and the stipend that came with it, all the attention that came with the prize seemed designed to highlight the fact of my womanhood rather than my talent, as if I couldn’t hold my own with the rest of the students, who of course were all men. I still remember how indifferently the president of the university shook my hand when he was introduced to me at the dinner held for the winners of prizes that year, and how warmly he greeted everyone else. At every turn I felt humiliated by the prize and the comparisons it brought up, and so instead of feeling grateful and humbled as I learned more about Noether, I came to resent her instead.

  Her life should have inspired me, but the more I came to learn, the more I understood that Noether was one of a kind, comparable to no one, truly unique. She’d made fundamental, revolutionary contributions to mathematics and written a theorem on symmetry that remains one of the most beautiful and deepest results in theoretical physics. She was a woman who had succeeded in all the ways I feared I might fail: against all odds, she’d gained the respect and support of her peers. I felt there wasn’t room for both of us, and that I had already fallen behind. The people she’d known, the things she’d accomplished all rose up in reproach, casting their light on my inadequacies. I was jealous—and ashamed of my jealousy. I didn’t know yet what enormous arrogance that was on my part, or what a regrettable waste of time.

  I WANTED TO MAKE an impression my first day of graduate school, and I planned what I would wear, how I would walk, where I’d sit, and where I’d direct my eyes. I’d filled out in my final years at college and had been made aware that I had come to be considered attractive. I understood the choice was be seen or be invisible. I decided I wanted to be seen.

  I wore a white silk blouse and a pencil skirt and pumps with skinny little heels. A watch, some lipstick, and a string of pearls. I sat at the front of the giant hall, in the first row, so that no one would miss me as they walked in. There’s a picture of our class from that first day, and even now when I look at it, I can see the defiance in the way I stood—shoulders back, gaze level at the camera, studiously conspicuous and also unconcerned.

  Ah! There I am in all my youth. That way I had of standing so that you had to take me in all at once: a cloud of dark brown hair (almost black) framing an angular, rebellious face—curious, unwavering, not-entirely-friendly eyes—a compact graceful body, and lovely legs that I still vainly remember a classmate once claimed had been made to break his heart.

  What a disturbance I caused! We were all serious students then, but the first week you wouldn’t have guessed it. The men in my classes—and there were only men—ogled me and talked about me. I was the constant target of speculation and assessment, both kind and unkind in nature. By turns my classmates were aggressive or circumspect, but always guarded and unnatural. Never again have I been so alienated as I was in that first year of graduate school, or made to feel so absolutely foreign. My opinions were never asked about anything, and yet I was always watched, as a symbol of something—an outsider who’d somehow made it in.

  EARLY ON, a classmate of mine named Richard told me a joke I’ve since heard again at various moments in my career. Back then there were only two or three women mathematicians from history whom anyone had heard of. The first was Emmy Noether, and the other was Sofia Kovalevskaya, a Russian mathematician who’d written several important papers on partial differential equations, the dynamics of Saturn’s rings, and elliptic integrals and who was best known for discovering the Kovalevskaya top—one of only three cases of integrable body motion.

  We were at a department gathering, all the graduate students awkwardly standing around a buffet table while the professors chatted in corners, when Richard blurted from across the table, “Hey, Katherine! Have you heard this one? There have only been two women in mathematics, and one was not really a mathematician, and the other was not really a woman.”

  It took me a moment to get the joke, that Sofia Kovalevskaya was “not really a mathematician,” and that Emmy Noether was “not really a woman.” I felt a flash of irritation.

  “Come on,” I said. “Why would you say that to me?”

  “Oh, come on yourself, it’s a joke, Kat,” he said, shortening my name. “Lighten up.”

  “Whatever you say, Dick,” I said, shortening his.

  That silenced him for exactly half a second, and then he burst out laughing and punched me lightly on the arm, shaking his head. “Not bad, Miss Kat,” he said. “Not bad at all.”

  For a moment I was tempted to cling to my outrage. But then I looked into his laughing face and relaxed. He had meant no harm. Not that the joke itself was without harm, not that in his hands it wasn’t a weapon, whether he knew it or not.

  But by then I was resigned to these jokes, to the constant reminder that I was an anomaly, an outsider, a kind of freak. I was aware that even if I contributed to our field, my name would also become a punch line. I didn’t know how to resist, except to make clear that I wasn’t trying to fit in, that I knew I was different, and to highlight that difference to make it clear. For instance, I always wore skirts, never pants—even on winter days when the wind blew through my long, thick coat and wrapped itself around my legs, I persisted. I’d bought the longest, most luxurious coat I could find in a deep chocolate brown that I knew set off the darkness of my hair. That was the one decadent thing that I owned. The rest of my clothes were sometimes elegant, almost to the point of being severe, but cut, always, to fit exactly—if not to accentuate, to acknowledge the fact that I was a woman in a woman’s body. No prim or prissy outfits for me. No nun’s shapeless shift. And over it all a coat to go to the opera in.

  Emmy Noether had done no such thing—she displayed no interest in her own femininity and flaunted neither her looks nor her clothes. Here was a woman who had succeeded in all the ways I aspired to, and all Richard saw fit to make of her life was a dumb and ignorant joke. This was nothing new of course: after she died, a full page was devoted in her tribute to the fact that she’d died alone and had never—to anyone’s knowledge—had sexual relations. And during his eulogy for her, the famous mathematician Hermann Weyl, who’d been one of her closest collaborators, stood at her grave and talked at length of her triumphs and genius, but closed with a treatise on how she lacked all the charms of the “gentler” sex, outlining her mannish appearance, her simple nature, and how she was unfit to feel love for a man, and incapable of sparking his passion. What injustice these men did her, her colleagues and friends, with their affectionate, condescending, deliberate, and delicately worded gibes about how no one wanted to seduce her! As if that was the last word, as if they weren’t bespectacled savants in baggy clothes themselves. I wonder if that was what ultimately allowed them to accept her into their ranks—a deficiency in one sense that let them accept her as a genius in another. Does there always have to exist, in the end, such a choice?

  Chapter 9

  SAY THERE’S A GIRL AND A BOY, AND THEY’RE MADLY IN love with each other, but they live on opposite sides of a lake that neither of them can cross. The boy wants to marry the girl and buys a ring to propose. There’s a ferryman who goes back and forth on the lake. In his boat he carries a box on which you can put any lock. If you put something in the box, he’ll take it across to the other side, but unless the box is locked he’ll steal whatever you give him before he reaches the shore. Either way, he can go back and forth across the lake as often as you ask him to. The boy has one lock and the key to his lock, and the girl has another lock and the key to her lock. How does the boy get her the ring?

  I SOLVED THIS PROBLEM for extra credit on my final exam in Peter Hall’s class my first semester of graduate school. Peter liked to give freebie brainteasers at the ends of his exams for anyone who had extra time, which few people attempted since they were generally entangled in the actual problems, and because the extra credit questions were worth very litt
le, points-wise. This one had been worth the constant e (a little less than 3 points in a 100-point exam); another had been worth π. In any case, Peter Hall called me into his office after the exam, and when I walked in, he said I had received the highest score in the class on the exam by e + 5 points. He congratulated me.

  “I’ve never received an irrational test score before,” I quipped (the number e had been named after Euler, who’d proven its irrationality in the eighteenth century).

  “Ha,” Peter said, in a way that made me immediately wonder how many students had made the same joke before me.

  I looked at the equations on the chalkboards behind him, and then down at his gleaming wood desk. I felt tongue-tied and inexplicably shy.

  “You should know that the extra credit problem you solved is one of the foundational problems of modern cryptography,” he said. “And you were the only one to solve it.” He reached across his desk, and shook my hand. “Congratulations. I’ve got my eye on you.”

  I blushed.

  You have to understand: he was Peter Hall. The most famous mathematician on the faculty, maybe in America, appealing in that rumpled scientist way, and he had his eye on me. He’d written a problem that in our class only I had solved, and he’d couched it in the language of love then revealed it to belong to the domain of cryptography—I was in over my head before we began. The problem I’d solved—that I felt sure he’d written for me—had drawn me in as only a mathematical problem could: bounded, defined, it was a puzzle to break your head over until a solution appeared—everything leading up to it a struggle, but the answer itself effortless as a drawn breath.