The Great Man model of a genius working alone

This model exists in Physics, too, and also in private sector engineering companies* and I am guessing it exists in many physical sciences. There is a distinct "show no weakness" corollary to it- never ask for help, never ask to collaborate. People who like to work in teams tend to get left out by this model. Since women tend heavily to prefer the team model to the Lone Genius model, women are disproportionately excluded. There are very few people who will admit that what gets discovered has anything to do with the discoverer. Most people in scientific fields agree that what they discover is independent of who they are - that is, the laws of relativity would be the same if Ms. Duchin had discovered them rather than Albert Einstein. What few people will admit is that the choice of what to study and the choice of approach can influence whether or what one discovers. Those two things are heavily dependent on the personal biases of the investigator.

*The team model purportedly in existence in industry almost never involves two people actually working together and sharing ideas. I like to compare engineering teams to baseball teams - the pitcher might be on the team, but she is up there on the mound pitching by herself; the short stop might be on the team, but she is out in the field short stopping by herself; etc.

I went to high school with Moon Duchin. When I was a junior, she and another freshman both took Advanced Math with me. Their reputations preceded them: one of them had gotten a perfect score on the SATs in junior high school. That score was, I believe, one of the motivating factors that led to an overhaul of the SATs in the next year or so.

Moon and I were also in the drama club together. She used to send me notes with cryptic messages in them. We traveled in many of the same circles, but I haven't seen her for years. It doesn't surprise me to hear that she's become a very accomplished mathematician or that she went to Harvard; her intellectual capacity was always very apparent.

I get a kick out of seeing her featured here as bad-ass woman of the day.

I'm not sure the "great man of X" outlived the gentleman scholars of eighteenth/nineteenth century. A quick look at the Nobel laureates for physics, chemistry and medicine suggest that most of the recipients received the prize as part of a group. This is especially true within the last 40 years it seems. Compare this with economics where they all seem to receive prizes for solitary achievements.

Also, it seems one of the remarkable points about Andrew Wiles' proof of the Shimura--Taniyama conjecture was that he did work alone for a long time. That's what makes it so unusual. And even so, the work could not have been done without significant collaboration toward the end. A lot of important mathematics (particularly that of Nicholas Bourbaki) has come out of working together. Find out your Erdos number today! ;-)

I had never heard of her before now, but Ms. Duchin sounds like my kind of lady!

I'm currently reading "The Making of the Atomic Bomb", which goes into excruciating detail about the personalities and quirks of those whose discoveries lead to the necessary technology for the bomb, both in the "lone genius" stage and in the group at the Manhattan Project. What falls out of the discussion is that, while all the players were brilliantly smart, it was the particular personalities of the individual players that determined how each played their part (theory, design, innovation, etc -- even down to particular theories/inventions), and then how things really took off when the right people got in the same room together.

Anyway, I think this relates to her question "Does it hinge on specific people or is it inevitable...?" I think the answer is yes, it does hinge on specific people, but it can also hinge on group dynamics. Having brilliant women (like Moon!) be part of that dynamic, whether the "lone genius" model sticks or not, will undoubtedly change how the math/science/tech fields develop as more and more women push for prominence in these areas. And I think that rocks!

The (male) genius model is the same in fine art. Big time.

You can read her paper on "The Sexual Politics of Genius" here (pdf). It makes the compelling point that the way "genius" is defined - at least in mathematics - almost necessarily excludes women, and women who do show genius at mathematics are defeminized.

(I've also got a post about her on my blog, linked to my name.)

Moon was my rugby coach! Awesome in so many ways!!

I really liked what she says here:

"Why the notion of genius is so attractive with thinking about math and how it functions, and what it does to math as a field," she says. "Lots of people think this is a non-social field—would math come out differently in a society with a different social organization?"

I think social structure does play apart, I just read this article, “Study: Girls in Sexist Societies Worse at Math, Countries with Higher Gender Equality Produce Girls Who Are Better at Math”. You can read it here http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=4956998&page=1

Very interesting stuff…

Fragments of the male genius model can also be identified in societal assumptions about what is assumed to be natural aptitudes torwards one interest or another simply based on gender. I always hated it when my mother (who loved Dr. Laura) told me I that I was bad at math and good in English because of my female gender.

" Moon was my rugby coach! "

....and she played rugby? Thats my favorite sport!

I haven't read her work, so I'm not sure what angle she's coming from; that is, I'm not sure if she's suggesting the rules of numbers might change depending on the social structures surrounding their development, of if she means the applications and therefore the disciplines.

I can't speak to the first, but I think the second is absolutely correct, and one of the things it boils down to is wealth. Mesopotamia and Egypt could produce complex math (Mesopotamians were on base 12 or something equally unfathomable to my humanities-educated brain) while the Greeks were still figuring out this whole "trade" business because they had wealth, and they had lower classes. A society can only produce abstractions, like negative numbers and monotheism (and other complex theologies), when there is a sufficient excess of wealth that a group of people can afford to let other people tend to their needs while they use their energy to produce said abstractions. Math, science, and culture would be very different, if only in that it all would have gone down a very different set of paths (and I'm trying not to make a judgement here, good or bad), if privilege had not been in the equation.