The Math Babe and the Science Babe

Two interesting blogs that I follow are called, respectively, The Science Babe and mathbabe. No, neither of these blogs are prurient websites that are weak on content. Instead, they both seek to reclaim the terms from websites that are.

The Math Babe is none other than Cathy O’Neil, a Ph.D. Number Theorist who left academia about four years ago for industry. She blogs not only about being a female mathematician, but also the mathematical techniques and tools that she is acquiring right now in industry. I do hope that she blogs about Number Theory too, although it’s exciting to read about how she is mastering Python and R.

A recent post that I find interesting is about Working with Larry Summers. Summers was the president of Harvard University between 2001 and 2006, who resigned in disgrace after the bad publicity generated in part by his comments about women’s aptitude in mathematics. After this, he worked at D.E. Shaw, which is where Cathy got to work with him. His project there was apparently to chase dumb-money. Any profit involved was at the cost to pension funds that many of us hope to retire on. Yuck!

Now, how about the Science Babe? Let’s save that for another post!


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