BSHM/Gresham College meeting: Women in Mathematics: A Celebration of the Bicentenary of Ada Lovelace Gresham College, London, 29 October 2015

Abstract

I n 2015 the theme of the annual BSHM/Gresham College meeting was ‘Women in Mathematics: A Celebration of the Bicentenary of Ada Lovelace’. Since 2012 these lectures have been accompanied by two other invited talks on a related subject to form a series of half-day meetings. The first talk entitled Hypatia: Sifting the Myths was given by Dr Fenny Smith. Fenny introduced Hypatia as the first women mathematician of whom we have reasonably secure and detailed knowledge. Hypatia devoted her life to the teaching of mathematics and Neoplatonist philosophy in Alexandria, practising around the turn of the 4th to 5th centuries AD. The talk gave a fascinating account of current thinking on her life and mathematics and of the ancient and secondary source material. Much of what we know about her teaching and her pupils comes from the letters of her pupil Synesius of Cyrene, a city on the north coast of modern Libya. It is from Synesius also that we learn about some of her mathematics, finding that she wrote commentaries on the Arithmetic of Diophantus, the Astronomical Canon and the Conics of Apollonius. Dr Smith also discussed the nature of Hypatia’s involvement with her father Theon’s commentary on Book III of the Almagest, Ptolemy’s influential work on the motions of the stars and planets. The talk finished with a discussion of the complex political, religious and social factors involved in Hypatia’s brutal murder and mutilation in c. 415 AD. This talk was followed by a lecture by Dr Peter Neumann OBE, Emeritus Fellow of the Queen’s College, Oxford, on his mother Hanna Neumann and on her distinguished career as a mathematician in the twentieth century. The title wasHanna Neumann: A Mathematician in Difficult Times and Peter drew on archival research and personal memories in discussing his mother’s life and work. She was born in Berlin in 1914, christened Johanna von Caemmerer, and in the interwar period studied mathematics at Humboldt University, Berlin and then at G€ ottingen. In 1938 she moved to Britain and later that year married B H Neumann who also enjoyed a distinguished mathematical career. During the war Hanna studied for her DPhil thesis, On Free Products of Groups, and Peter gave a charming and I found inspirational account of the circumstances in which this work was undertaken. After the war she held posts at University College, Hull and Manchester College of Science and Technology before emigrating to the Institute for Advanced Study, ANU, Canberra in 1963 where her husband had moved the previous year. She died suddenly in Canada in November 1971 while on a lecture tour. The lecture finished with a brief account of her main mathematical work in group theory. The Gresham BSHM lecture was delivered by Ursula Martin, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Oxford, who spoke on The Scientific Life of Ada Lovelace. Ada Lovelace is famous for a paper published in 1843, which