I've just started an occasional blog at ICMS where I am Scientific Director. I thought I'd upload it here too.
Extraordinary Women (Paul Glendinning, Scientific Director)
On 14 September 2017 ICMS will host a Public Lecture on Mary Somerville and the Secrets of the
Universe by Elisabetta Strickland of the University of Rome. Elisabetta has
written a recent biography of Somerville and the talk will be part of Maths
Week Scotland (http://www.gov.scot/Topics/Education/Schools/curriculum/MakingMathsCountScotland/MathsWeekScotland).
Somerville was a mathematician in the early nineteenth century. She taught
Byron’s daughter Ada Lovelace, who went on to work with Charles Babbage on
early computers, and Somerville College in Oxford is named after her. This summer she will feature on the new RBS
£10 note.
I’ll write more about Somerville later in the year, but the
Women in Science connection made me think of two outstanding films I watched on
a recent flight to New Zealand: Hidden
Figures (dir. Theodore Melfi, 2016) and Marie
Curie (dir. Marie Noelle, 2016). Both films are about women doing science
and both feature sexism and racial prejudice: the human computers at NASA are
black in 1960s America and Marie Curie is a Pole in France at the beginning of
the twentieth century. Here are my top moments from each of the films. I am
aware that both of my scenes feature men in films that are about women, so why
not post your favourite moments of science on film in the comments section
below to balance my choices.
Marie Curie
contains the best moment of people doing maths that I have ever seen on film.
Solvay has invited a hand-picked group of physicists to one of his conferences.
After dinner, Curie (played by Karolina Gruszaka) and Einstein (Piotr Glowacki)
are slumped over the table with a piece of paper, trying to understand how
radioactivity works at the nuclear level. There is no wide-eyed excitement or
momentous breakthrough, just two scientists quietly trying to tease out ideas
from one another. Einstein suggests starting with case of one electron in a
magnetic field. Curie says she’s not clear whether Maxwell’s equations can be
applied. Langevin (Arieh Worthalter) looks on. A perfect moment of thoughtful
calm.
In Hidden Figures,
Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson) finally cracks and explains that she has
been away from her desk because the nearest ‘coloured bathroom’ is half a mile
away. In the next scene we watch as her boss, Al Harrison (Kevin Costner),
takes what feels like an age to destroy the ‘Colored Ladies Room’ sign in the
West Computing Group building with a sledgehammer. When it is finally knocked
off the wall he walks away saying ‘at NASA we all pee the same colour’. I loved
this scene because it takes so long to destroy the sign (change is never easy)
and it took me much of that time to realise the significance of what he was
doing. Harrison was not making things a bit better by creating a coloured
toilet closer to his group; his radical (and right) solution was to destroy the
very idea of ‘coloured’ toilets. Ditto coffee pots a bit earlier.
Of course there’s more. Curie wins the Nobel Prize (twice),
Johnson provides the maths that will allow computers to calculate critical
rocket entry positions and Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer) develops the programming
skills to implement Johnson’s ideas. The films are very different, but they are
both entertaining and interesting. It is worth making an effort to see them.
