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Piper Harron

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Piper H (Piper Harron) is a mathematician specializing in arithmetic statistics and algebraic number theory, and a blogger who writes about the oppressive and discriminatory culture in academia in the field of mathematics.[1][2][3] Piper was a February 2021 honoree on Mathematically Gifted and Black.[2] After postdoctoral research at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa[4] she began a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto.[5]

Education and early life[edit]

Piper earned her bachelor's degree in Romance languages from New York University in 2002, and her masters degree in Mathematics (2009) and Ph.D. (January 2016) from Princeton University, where she was advised by Manjul Bhargava. She describes herself as having grown up in a predominately white neighborhood, attending predominately white schools.[2] Piper spent three years on coursework, and ten years on her dissertation.

Career[edit]

After graduating she was a post-doc at University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She is currently a post-doctoral fellow at University of Toronto. In 2021, she was named a Mathematically Gifted and Black Honoree.[6]

Experiences with racism and misogyny[edit]

She left Princeton in 2009 due to an illness, and gave birth to her first child in 2011.[1] In her CV she describes her time at Princeton as:

  • survived external and internalized misogyny
  • survived external and internalized racism
  • survived pervasive and internalized cult of genius mythology[3]

She describes the choice to throw out her thesis and start over a result of becoming consciously anti-racist. She hoped that the final version of it would make mathematics more accessible and change people's views about who can do mathematics.[1] She added a prologue to her revised version that start's with “Respected research math is dominated by men of a certain attitude.” The full version

“Even allowing for individual variation, there is still a tendency towards an oppressive atmosphere, which is carefully maintained and even championed by those who find it conducive to success. As any good grad student would do, I tried to fit in, mathematically. I absorbed the atmosphere and took attitudes to heart. I was miserable, and on the verge of failure. The problem was not individuals, but a system of self-preservation that, from the outside, feels like a long string of betrayals, some big, some small, perpetrated by your only support system. When I physically removed myself from the situation, I did not know where I was or what to do. First thought: FREEDOM!!!! Second thought: but what about the others like me, who don’t do math the “right way” but could still greatly contribute to the community? I combined those two thoughts and started from zero on my thesis. People who, for instance, try to read a math paper and think, “Oh my goodness what on earth does any of this mean why can’t they just say what they mean????” rather than, “Ah, what lovely results!” (I can’t even pretend to know how “normal” mathematicians feel when they read math, but I know it’s not how I feel.) My thesis is, in many ways, not very serious, sometimes sarcastic, brutally honest, and very me. It is my art. It is myself. It is also as mathematically complete as I could honestly make it. “I’m unwilling to pretend that all manner of ways of thinking are equally encouraged, or that there aren’t very real issues of lack of diversity. It is not my place to make the system comfortable with itself. This may be challenging for happy mathematicians to read through; my only hope is that the challenge is accepted.”[7]

In 2015 a Scientific American article described Piper as the way of the future, suggesting "mathematicians should think about how they want to explain mathematics and who they are inviting in or leaving out in the process."[8] In a 2015 American Mathematics Society blog post, Piper's thesis was described as one of the best things to happen in 2015 "not because of the groundbreaking mathematics, but because it was an indicting commentary on the culture of mathematics and mathematicians. Harron’s thesis is a take-down of sorts, of the pervasive opacity and exclusivity of mathematics."[9]

In 2017 she wrote a blog post for the American Mathematical Society, Get out of the Way[10] calling on cis white male professors to resign from their positions, and make room for women of color and trans people. This blog post has received 91 comments and a discussion titled What do mathematicians think about Piper Harron's recent AMS article started on Quora, focusing on her suggestion that white male professors with tenure resign from their positions.[11] In 2019 she wrote Diversity-22, a diversity statement, which illuminates the lack of diversity in mathematics departments, and describes her experiences pursuing a mathematics career as a "sequence of anecdotes on how to keep marginalized people out of math."[12]

Awards and recognition[edit]

  • PhD thesis received widespread media coverage: including The Hindu's thREAD Blog, Scientific American blog, and AMS blog’s “Best of 2015”[3]
  • Beatrice Yormark Visiting Scholar, Stanford University, May 2016[3]
  • First Year Fellowship, Princeton University, 2003–2004[3]

Selected publications and articles[edit]

References[edit]

  1. 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 "Piper Harron discusses her artistic and wonderful math Ph.D. thesis". mathbabe. 2015-12-11. Retrieved 2021-04-13.
  2. 2.0 2.1 2.2 "Piper H". Mathematically Gifted & Black. Retrieved 2021-04-06.
  3. 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 "The Liberated Mathematician". The Liberated Mathematician. Retrieved 2021-04-06.
  4. "Piper Harron, Former Temporary Assistant Professor". People profiles. University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Department of Mathematics. Retrieved 2021-04-27.
  5. "Piper Harron, Postdoctoral Fellow". People. University of Toronto Department of Mathematics. Retrieved 2021-04-27.
  6. "Piper H". Mathematically Gifted & Black. Retrieved 2021-04-13.
  7. 7.0 7.1 Harron, Piper Alexis (2016). "The Equidistribution of Lattice Shapes of Rings of Integers of Cubic, Quartic, and Quintic Number Fields: An Artist's Rendering".
  8. Lamb, Evelyn. "Contrasts in Number Theory". Scientific American Blog Network. Retrieved 2021-04-13.
  9. annahaensch (2015-12-30). "The Best and Worst of Math in 2015". Retrieved 2021-04-13.
  10. Piper (2017-05-11). "Get Out The Way". Retrieved 2021-04-06.
  11. "What do mathematicians think about Piper Harron's recent AMS article? Should white male professors with tenure resign from their positions? - Quora". www.quora.com. Retrieved 2021-04-06.
  12. Piper (2019-12-17). "Diversity-22". Retrieved 2021-04-06.
  13. Bhargava, Manjul; Harron, Piper (2016). "The equidistribution of lattice shapes of rings of integers in cubic, quartic, and quintic number fields". Compositio Mathematica. 152 (6): 1111–1120. doi:10.1112/S0010437X16007260. ISSN 0010-437X.

External links[edit]


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