While I don't doubt that Geiringer did a lot of important work, I'm a little frustrated with how difficult it is to read about that work itself.<p>Look at a Wikipedia article about a relatively obscure mathematician, say, Robert Remak:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Remak_(mathematician)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Remak_(mathematician)</a><p>Right away it says what fields he worked in and mentions some of his results. The rest of the article goes into a bit more depth about his work and then finishes off with a paragraph about the tragedy in his life.<p>Compare now with Hilda Geiringer's article:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilda_Geiringer" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilda_Geiringer</a><p>Her work is described in very vague strokes, "two variable Fourier series" and then mentions statistics, probability, and plasticity... so, what did she do exactly? These are very broad fields! The article does mention the Geiringer equations, but there's no corresponding Wikipedia article about them.<p>The majority of Geiringer's article is instead taken up by the fact that she was a Jewish woman with relatively very little attention given to her mathematics.<p>To be clear, I'm not saying that this is a Wikipedia-exclusive phenomenon. The BBC article is also rather "soft", as a popular article must be out of necessity, but for minorities, sometimes they (we?) must deal being talked about in nothing but soft articles. The geek feminism wiki calls this the unicorn law:<p><a href="https://geekfeminism.wikia.org/wiki/Unicorn_Law" rel="nofollow">https://geekfeminism.wikia.org/wiki/Unicorn_Law</a>
She may be cool, but she didn't "reshape Mathematics". Wish such articles would come without so much hyperbole.<p>And as for missed geniuses, there are many missed male geniuses, too, many famously so (even Einstein didn't get a position as a professor at first). They suggest only women are overlooked, which is untrue.<p>There are also examples of female mathematicians even further back being fostered by famous mathematicians.
if we are talking about female mathematicians don't forget Emmy Noether: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether</a>
Summary: Woman contributes to mathematics; can't find appropriate academic position because she isn't a man.<p>As far as the article goes there is a bit about her contribution which is over inflated to, "reshaped maths". This is used as a jumping off point to talk about how she can't find the same work her male counterparts would, skills being equal. Finding out that professors were mostly men in the early to mid 20th century is hardly noteworthy but the article spends some time on it. Finally a bit of commentary by the author about missed opportunities because people other than white men have ideas, too.<p>The last seems to be the point, but it reads as an attempt to find misery and highlight it, rather than perhaps remembering the woman and her contribution. The contribution the author is really interested in is the failure and the opportunity it presents to make a trite statement about equality of opportunity. All with a click bait title.
Classic HN baiting; I predict the comments will be over 50% meta-commentary about the title's inaccuracy and possibly something about the principle of highlighting female mathematicians, a sizeable chunk on suggestions for female mathematicians with a larger impact, and very little about Geiringer, her mathematics and her legacy...