"I asked myself what I most valued about teaching mathematics"

May 14, 2021 7:52 AM

Mathematician Ursula Whitcher is an editor for a database of mathematical research. "Branch cuts: writing, editing, and ramified complexities" (9-page PDF) discusses reevaluating career priorities (especially after the University of Wisconsin redefined tenure), reflecting on gender and sexuality, and "bridging queer and mathematical communities". Whitcher has also written for the American Mathematical Society on predictive policing, research projects that a protagonist of a Courtney Milan romance novel might be interested in, and more.

From "Branch cuts":

Things really clicked into place when I started teaching Math for Liberal Arts.This was a 100-level class that wasn’t a prerequisite for anything else, so I had complete freedom: my only charge was to persuade my students that math was bigger and more fascinating than they had realized. We talked about cryptography, voting theory, and the fourth dimension. We used measurements of gerrymandering to explore topological concepts such as connectedness; my students made brochures advertising unsolved math problems. In this context, being a little bit weird felt natural: I could be warm and enthusiastic about strange things in a genuine way.....

I still had to answer the bigger question: was I really going to walk away from a job as a tenured professor? There’s a huge mystique bound up in tenure, but fundamentally it’s a job recruitment tool: it offers security and status. I had already earned the status. The security associated with tenure in the University of Wisconsin System felt more and more like a fiction....

Lots of people around my age are reassessing how they identify in light of new information. Personally, I had the intense and mixed emotions that sometimes arise after struggling with a proof, where you’re torn between wanting people to share in your revelation and being embarrassed you didn’t notice the trick long ago. But there was also a comfort in reclassification.....

This is the point, in a conventional twenty-first century American coming out narrative, where I should tell you what my pronouns are....

Disclaimer: I know the author.

posted by brainwane (12 comments total)

Thanks, this resonated with me, and it's a very nicely written piece.
posted by Alex404 at 8:29 AM on May 14, 2021 [2 favorites]

sorry for irrelevant/derail but Ursula Whitcher is the coolest name EVER
posted by supermedusa at 10:33 AM on May 14, 2021 [3 favorites]

'I signed their forms, in exchange for photographs of horses.'

You and me both, sister...
posted by kaibutsu at 10:58 AM on May 14, 2021 [1 favorite]

I kind of just want to write a 20-page appreciation highlighting all the things I love about the "Branch cuts" piece. I love that it starts with protesters - in 2011, protesting in favor of bargaining rights for school and university employees. I love her early mention of her support for stipends for the research her students did. I love her explanation of the two-body problem within her own relationship. I love her recounting of the history with math in middle school, how it saved her from some of the harassment and bullying, and how it led to her being "in a room full of blond Wisconsin students, the only woman without makeup, trying to teach the algebra I’d learned in seventh grade." I LOVE her descriptions of Math for Liberal Arts (brochures advertising unsolved math problems!), a class I think I would enjoy immensely.

I love her acknowledgement footnote at the bottom of the first page.

I could go on and on and on.

Perhaps that class would help me calculate the exceptionally small odds that I would ever have come across Dr. Whitcher and her / their (p. 7, last paragraph) fabulous writing without this excellent post.

Thank you so much for sharing this with us, brainwane. This is my favorite thing on MetaFilter right now.
posted by kristi at 11:12 AM on May 14, 2021 [10 favorites]

So much of Branch Cuts resonated with me. Thank you, brainwane.
posted by Westringia F. at 11:18 AM on May 14, 2021 [3 favorites]

I don't have the heart to read this right now because I'm not in a mental state to be able to withstand the details of the tenure changes. I was a postdoc at UW Madison back in the day and have dear friends on the faculty. :'(
posted by heatherlogan at 2:35 PM on May 14, 2021 [2 favorites]

Hey, I went to grad school with her.
posted by eruonna at 2:37 PM on May 14, 2021 [3 favorites]

Hold On is checked out to you until June 4, 2021.
posted by bq at 3:09 PM on May 14, 2021

I also went to grad school with her. Small world.
posted by samw at 9:21 PM on May 14, 2021 [1 favorite]

I want to add a little something else to this discussion, because I feel like this post deserves a bit more discussion, but I suspect most of the reactions to the Branch cuts piece are both intensely positive and personal, so there's not much to say but thank you.

I have a really hard time wrapping my head around gender identity. Of course, unlike the author, it's also very easy for me to ignore gender, because being a white man means I can mostly do what I want without chafing against peoples' expectations. There are of course some things that chafe, especially these days around parenting, but they're relatively minor and have proven easy for me to ignore.

But still, were people to ask me if I identify as male my sincere answer would be no. I share the author's amusement when I'm misgendered by algorithms, and again if I'm honest I'd probably list my pronouns as he/they... except it feels too easy for me to write, and I feel like there's something I'm missing.

It's not really gender identity I struggle with, but identity in general. I can understand identity in the negative sense, in that people are discriminated against because of their gender, skin colour, etc., and as a white man I suffer very little of that. But identity in the positive sense? As in how I see myself, or how I want to see myself? I don't really get it, and I don't really think about it. Do most people?

I just am. I am a scientist and a parent and a spouse. Because that's what I do.

Anyway, this piece helped me articulate some things that are often in the back of my mind. These are important topics that I feel like I lack the conceptual tools to talk about, so I'm sorry if I've offended anyone here due to my ignorance.
posted by Alex404 at 12:59 PM on May 15, 2021 [2 favorites]

Well, what a lovely article.
posted by vernondalhart at 9:37 AM on May 16, 2021 [2 favorites]

Alex404, I've been pondering the issues around categories and labels as that which make up our "identity" as opposed to that what makes us who we are since my teenage years. On reading your comment, it struck me whether what you were grappling with was marketing's segmentation of populations into demographics and target segments and lifestyles which have, over the past 5 or 6 decades, become conflated with "identity"?

brainwane, thank you for posting this. reading it now.
posted by infini at 10:02 AM on May 16, 2021