Abstract
The International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM), inaugurated in 1897, is the greatest effort of the mathematical community to strengthen international communication and connections across all mathematical fields. Meetings of the ICM have historically hosted some of the most prominent mathematicians of their time. Receiving an invitation to present a talk at an ICM signals the high international reputation of the recipient, and is akin to entering a ‘hall of fame for mathematics’. Women mathematicians attended the ICMs from the start. With the invitation of Laura Pisati to present a lecture in 1908 in Rome and the plenary talk of Emmy Noether in 1932 in Zurich, they entered the grand international stage of their field. At the congress in 2014 in Seoul, Maryam Mirzakhani became the first woman to be awarded the Fields Medal, the most prestigious award in mathematics. In this article, we dive into assorted data sources to follow the footprints of women among the ICM invited speakers, analyzing their demographics and topic distributions, and providing glimpses into their diverse biographies.
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Notes
- 1.
Every Wikipedia article is supposed to have a corresponding entry in Wikidata.
- 2.
- 3.
For all authors we used a gender assignment provided by a third party (Wikidata or a web service) which, for our dataset, resulted in a binary schema.
- 4.
Newnham College, founded in 1871, was the second women’s college to be established in Cambridge. It acquired full university status in 1948, the year in which the first women were were officially admitted to the University.
- 5.
Original title of the talk in German: “Hyperkomplexe Systeme in ihren Beziehungen zur kommutativen Algebra und zur Zahlentheorie”.
- 6.
ICM laudation, http://www.icm2014.org/en/awards/prizes/f4.
- 7.
Girton College was the first women’s college to be established in Cambridge. It began in Hitchen (about 24 miles from Cambridge) in 1869 before moving to Girton in 1873, when it acquired the name Girton College. Like Newnham, it obtained full college status in 1948.
- 8.
The Wikidata entry of some speakers shows quite a few different citizenships, e.g. uro Kurepa, a plenary speaker in 1954 and 1958, has had 5 different citizenships according to his Wikidata entry: Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia; Kingdom of Yugoslavia; Kingdom of Serbs, Croatians and Slovenes; Austria-Hungary; Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
- 9.
The Emmy Noether Lecture honors women who have made fundamental and sustained contributions to the mathematical sciences. Since 2006, this lecture is a permanent ICM feature, since 2014, a special commemorative plaquette is conferred to every ICM Emmy Noether Lecturer.
- 10.
- 11.
Statement by the EWM convenors Elena Resmerita and Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb in reaction to the absence of women among the Fields medalists in 2018. https://www.europeanwomeninmaths.org/ewm-statement-about-icm-2018.
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Acknowledgements
This research was conducted as part of the project ‘A Global Approach to the Gender Gap in Mathematical, Computing, and Natural Sciences: How to Measure It, How to Reduce It?’, supported by the International Science Council and several scientific unions. We thank June Barrow-Green, Fulvia Furinghetti, Catherine Goldstein and Annette Vogt for providing important insight and expertise from History of Mathematics. We further thank Lucia Santamaria for suggestions that greatly improved the manuscript. We gratefully acknowledge the support of the International Mathematical Union for granting us access to their data on ICM Plenary and Invited Speakers.
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Mihaljević, H., Roy, MF. (2019). A Data Analysis of Women’s Trails Among ICM Speakers. In: Araujo, C., Benkart, G., Praeger, C., Tanbay, B. (eds) World Women in Mathematics 2018. Association for Women in Mathematics Series, vol 20. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21170-7_5
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