Men and Women in the History of Mathematics

Just like in everything else, in math there are boys and girls. There have been many very influential men and women mathematicians. But what differences between the 2 genders in the way they handle and interpret math and why are there more historic men in math than women.

There is no difference in math ability before age 7. Starting in childhood, some differences appear (boys score around 30-35 points higher than girls on the math portion of the SAT). But, scores on different categories of math vary by quite a bit (often with girls outperforming boys consistently). When boys do better, they are usually also doing worse. Boys are also more likely than girls to get nearly all the answers wrong. So they end up on both ends of the spectrum; boys are both better, and worse, than girls at math. Even though boys do better than girls on the SAT, it turns out those scores do not reflect math performance in classrooms. As girls often get better scores than boys in the classroom.

I don't believe that gender plays a role on who can learn and do good at math and if you study and try hard enough you will do better than anyone else can. The way people learn could also play a big role in how different people learn and interpret math as not everyone learns from watching a video just as others can't learn by doing a worksheet. Outside factors also play a big role on what someone's thoughts are focused on. For instance if there is stress at home someone may focus on that all day even if that's not what's on their immediate mind it will reside in the back not allowing them to concentrate fully

Although there have been many great male and female mathematicians that have heavily contributed to math most of the most known mathematicians are men mainly due to stipulation and sexisim. Some of the most notable mathematicians for each gender are Leonhard Euler for men and Emmy Noether for the women. Emmy was born in Germany in 1882 and had her math education delayed as she was a woman she received as PhD in a branch of abstract algebra and found a university position but that was taken away as she was jewish. So she moved to America and developed many of the mathematical foundations for Einstein's theory of relativity. And Leonhard contributed the basis of modern math such as the concept of a function and the way its written as f(x). He continued to develop calculus, topology, number theory, analysis and graph theory as well as much more.

The thing is there will always be differences between everyone in the way they learn and interpret things and until we reform schools to a more modern system of education in which each subjects has different ways of teaching the same subjects there will always be ones who succeed and those who fail.

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