DJ, just as Ms Hopper found people wouldn't believe her idea of the compiler, I'm long enough in the tooth to know that people are usually unable to conceive that their minds might be wrong. They cling to their prejudices like liferafts. Look at the Globalstar people for example. There's even a phrase for the result when reality finally impinges on the faulty conceptual framework people have = cognitive dissonance.
<Grace Hopper was born Grace Brewster Murray, the oldest of three children. Her father, Walter Murray, was an insurance broker while her mother, Mary Van Horne, had a love of mathematics which she passed on to her daughter. Both Grace's parents believed that she and her sister should have an education of the same quality as her brother. >
Do you think her education in maths was delayed until she had passed puberty? Of course not. Her beloved mother would have had her off and running in infancy.
Note another female mathematicians whose mathematical education was not delayed until too late. www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk <Sofia was attracted to mathematics at a very young age. Her uncle Pyotr Vasilievich Krukovsky, who had a great respect for mathematics, spoke about the subject. Sofia wrote in her autobiography:-
The meaning of these concepts I naturally could not yet grasp, but they acted on my imagination, instilling in me a reverence for mathematics as an exalted and mysterious science which opens up to its initiates a new world of wonders, inaccessible to ordinary mortals.
When Sofia was 11 years old, the walls of her nursery were papered with pages of Ostrogradski's lecture notes on differential and integral analysis. She noticed that certain things on the sheets she had heard mentioned by her uncle. Studying the wallpaper was Sofia's introduction to calculus.
It was under the family's tutor, Y I Malevich, that Sofia undertook her first proper study of mathematics, and she says that it was as his pupil that
I began to feel an attraction for my mathematics so intense that I started to neglect my other studies.
Sofia 's father decided to put a stop to her mathematics lessons but she borrowed a copy of Bourdeu's Algebra which she read at night when the rest of the household was asleep.
A year later a neighbour, Professor Tyrtov, presented her family with a physics textbook which he had written, and Sofia attempted to read it. She did not understand the trigonometric formulas and attempted to explain them herself. Tyrtov realised that in her working with the concept of sine, she had used the same method by which it had developed historically. Tyrtov argued with Sofia's father that she should be encouraged to study mathematics further but it was several years later that he permitted Sofia to take private lessons. >
Modern collectivist education ignores individuals. The 19th century women were individuals with tutors and no artificial limits put on them.
Where their early years aren't ignored in the notes about them, the females in the list www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk have had exceptional education backgrounds - here's another
<Of course there was no school in the middle of the Arizona desert, so when Julia was five years old (and Constance was seven) her new mother Edenia insisted that the family settle permanently somewhere where the children could be sent to school. They chose Point Loma in San Diego which was very small, having around 50 families, with a primary school which had so few pupils that it combined children of different ages into the same classroom. The arrangement allowed both Julia and Constance to progress more rapidly through the levels than might otherwise have been possible. In 1928 Ralph and Edenia had a daughter Billie, so Julia now had a younger sister as well as an elder one. Her schooling was disrupted by a year off school with scarlet fever when she was nine years old.
Scarlet fever marked the beginning of a very difficult time for Julia. The whole family was put in quarantine for a month but soon after she had recovered from one disease Julia was struck down with another, namely rheumatic fever. This time she was sent to the home of a nurse and spent a year in bed before making a slow recovery. By the time she had fully regained her health, Julia had missed two years schooling. The family had already moved away from Point Loma so that Julia could restart school without having the problems of being far behind her friends. However the illness lasted longer than expected and two years seemed too much time for her to make up at the new school. A private tutor was employed and [8]:-
... in one year, working three mornings a week, she and I went through the state syllabuses for the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grades. It makes me wonder how much time must be wasted in classrooms.
Bowman spent the year 1932-33 at the Theodore Roosevelt Junior High School before entering San Diego High School in 1933. By the time she reached the final years of her schooling she was the only girl in her mathematics class and in her physics class.
>
and another... <Charlotte Angas Scott's father, the Rev Caleb Scott, was a Congregational Church minister and Principal of the Lancashire Independent College, Whallay Range. He provided tutors for his daughter from the age of seven and it was from these tutors that Charlotte Scott was first introduced to mathematics... >
It's so funny that people think I'm saying that women can't do maths and they quote women who have done maths as though that shows what I'm saying is wrong.
I'll write it succinctly so they can understand.
1...Women can do maths, especially if they have ability and get going at a young age and are inspired.
2...They can't do it as well as males of identical ability and inspiration because they have 3 years less than males before their brains become fully grown after puberty.
3...Collectivist education by age cohort is child abuse and mental suffocation. Females are especially harmed by it because they mature younger than males.
Lists of females who did maths don't show this theory is wrong.
The faulty shibboleth is that females are the same as males and can do the same things just as well. Nature disagrees and recognizes they are different and has, apart from a minor detail like making females able to manufacture babies, at which males are not much good, has determined that female brains should be fully grown 3 years before males. That has consequences. Nobody here seems to be able to understand what the consequences might be. What if it was 4 years earlier? Or 10 years earlier? Nature obviously has found that women fully grown at age 5 doesn't give a great result. Also, that women fully grown at age 30 doesn't give a great result. Nature has struck a balance for the conditions which existed over the past 20,000 years. Not too old, not too young, more or less about just right.
Now that we live in societies which bear almost no relationship to life in the year 5,000 BC, we should expect nature [or us, being the instruments of nature these days] to allow a drift in the 'ideal age' established over millennia. There will probably be a widening as the harsh, cruel and merciless grinder of nature which gave death at early ages is supplanted by human decisions in an era of low reproduction rates and longevity. Nature red in tooth and claw is not so much part of life in the Big Smoke. Well, it is, but in a different way. Nature is still as merciless as ever.
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