Alice's Adventures in Numberland
by Alice Silverberg

Over the years, I've told colleagues and friends about things I have seen or experienced. Many times, people have said that I should write them down so that they won't be lost and forgotten, since some of them might be useful parts of our history. I've been writing them down, without being sure what I would do with them. I decided to gradually post them on this website, and see what reactions I get. I suggest reading from the bottom up (starting with the August 2017 post "The Meritocracy"). Thoughtful and kind feedback would be useful for me, and would help me to revise the exposition to make it as useful as possible. I hope that while you read my stories you will ask yourself "What can I learn from this?" I'm particularly interested in knowing what you see as the point of the story, or what you take away from it. Please send feedback to asilverb@gmail.com. Thanks for taking the time to read and hopefully reflect on them!
I often run the stories past the people I mention, even when they are anonymized, to get their feedback and give them a chance to correct the record or ask for changes. When they tell me they're happy to be named, I sometimes do so. When I give letters as pseudonyms, there is no correlation between those letters and the names of the real people.
Saturday, April 5, 2025
Cat Scratch Fever
Monday, March 31, 2025
Thinking about sex
X and I hadn't seen each other since we were in grad school together. We were standing around with a couple of graduate students during a conference break. Y came bounding up to us, stuck out his hand to X, and gave him an unusually vigorous and ostentatious handshake. Y had been a grad student with us at Princeton, a few years ahead of X and me, and Y knew the two of us equally well.
Reflexively, I stuck out my hand to shake Y's. He looked at my hand, and then put his hands behind his back. It felt, metaphorically, like a slap in the face. The grad students watched the scene unfold, and I felt embarrassed. Eventually it dawned on me that Y's refusal to shake my hand was based on religious grounds.
The affiliation that he had written on his name tag was a U.S. government intelligence agency. So in some sense he was there as a representative of the U.S. government, and his trip was funded by me and other taxpayers.
When I saw Y at a conference break the next day, I pointed out that while I understood, respected, and supported our country's strong commitment to freedom of religion, as a taxpayer I had a reasonable expectation that he behave professionally and fairly in professional settings in which he represented my country. As such, I felt that if he would not shake the hand of a female colleague for religious reasons, he shouldn't shake the hand of a male colleague in a similar professional setting, as a matter of basic fairness and common decency.I asked what message was being sent to the two (female) grad students who had witnessed his handshake the previous day, about the differences in the way female and male mathematicians are treated by their colleagues and by people representing their government.
He agreed with everything I said, and even agreed that not shaking hands with men in professional settings was a fair and reasonable solution.
We discussed other ways in which he treated his female and male colleagues differently on religious grounds. One example he gave was, if someone were noisily vacuuming the hallway outside his office, he might close his office door when talking with a male colleague, but not with a female one. I pointed out that such actions could give an unfair advantage to one group over another, and suggested that he follow the same protocol as for handshakes: in professional settings, if he wouldn't do it with a female colleague, don't do it with a male colleague.
He explained that the prohibitions he followed were designed to get the practitioner not to think about sex. (And by putting his hands behind his back in response to my outstretched hand, he was reminding himself not to think about sex.)
After we discussed this point for several minutes, I remarked that this conversation was one of the few times I had talked about sex in a professional setting, and wasn't it interesting that his religious practice seemed to lead him to talk with female colleagues about sex, rather than preventing it. He agreed that it was interesting. (I could have pointed out that there are things I would rather discuss with my colleagues than sex or gender. And that I was surprised by how much he seemed to enjoy talking with me about thinking about sex.)
I don't know whether he now treats people equally and fairly in professional settings, irrespective of (his perception of) their gender. But I'm glad we went through the intellectual exercise of discussing it. I hope it gave him more to think about than sex!
Tuesday, February 4, 2025
The Interrupter
Monday, February 3, 2025
The Affirmative Action We Don't Talk About
Monday, January 6, 2025
The Moving Allowance
Tuesday, December 31, 2024
She was punished for behavior for which her male colleagues were rewarded
Monday, December 23, 2024
Everyone knows the arithmetic-geometric mean inequality!
When I was in my freshman year of college, a friend mentioned the arithmetic-geometric mean inequality. I asked, "What's that?"
He replied, "Everyone knows the arithmetic-geometric mean inequality!"
"I don't," I countered, "so not everyone knows it." I asked him to tell me what it was, in case I knew it under another name.
He stated the theorem, but I had never heard of it. It hadn't been taught in my high school math classes, and wasn't among the tricks I learned on my high school math team.
My friend was annoyed with me for being so dumb, and I was ashamed of my ignorance.
"Not all of us went to fancy prep schools," I retorted, trying to remind him of the advantages he had that I didn't.
Despite conversations like that, it took me ages to realize that many of my conflicts with my peers were probably due to class differences.
A colleague and I were discussing the many things going on in our department that I considered to be terribly unfair. She thought that I took them too seriously, and should just let them go.
"Life isn't fair," she declared.
"But shouldn't we try to make it fair?" I replied.
I sat next to that colleague at a colloquium dinner during my first year at Ohio State. I inherited my parents' Depression Era mindset. And I had a rather small salary (while Ohio State had topped the competing offers for the new tenure track hires who were male, they were only willing to match my other offers). I still had the habits of a grad student who had been trying to make ends meet on stipends and fellowships that didn't cover my (rather meager) expenses. So when it came time to order, I looked at the prices and ordered a soup. When it came time to pay, I was told that we were splitting the bill equally. I pointed out that I would have to pay about $30 more than the cost of what I had ordered.
My colleague who didn't care as much as I did about fairness turned to me and said, "No one else minds splitting the bill." To her, $30 was nothing. To me (in the mid-1980s), it was a lot. Feeling ashamed, I shut up and paid.
I still feel shame whenever I think about the arithmetic-geometric mean inequality or that colloquium dinner. Never underestimate the power of shame.
Of course it's true that life isn't fair. But who are the people who can afford to not worry about it? If you grew up knowing that you would always land on your feet, then being treated unfairly now and then might not be so important. But those of us who aspire to a higher socio-economic class than the one we started out in are sometimes afraid that if one thing goes wrong, we'll slip back to where we started, or even lower.
My colleague implicitly assumed that all of us faculty had similar socio-economic backgrounds. But hers was enough higher than mine to cause friction between us. And while she and I ended up in the same economic class, how we feel about things like fairness has a lot to do with where we started.
Bill Clinton won the 1992 Presidential election by repeatedly reminding us that America at its core is the idea that no matter who you are or where you're from, if you work hard and play by the rules, you can fulfill your potential and live the American Dream. This presupposes that we'll be rewarded for playing by the rules, and punished for breaking them. Fixing things when they're not fair allows people who work hard and play by the rules to raise themselves up.
Monday, December 16, 2024
"Women don't do math"
At Harvard in the 1970s, I was accustomed to seeing funding opportunities that were only open to men. It was unusual to see something open only to women. When I was a senior looking for funding for grad school, I noticed that I was eligible for the Alice Freeman Palmer Fellowship. I submitted an application to the Harvard committee responsible for sending a nomination to the national selection committee.
When I wasn't chosen as Harvard's nominee, I assumed that my file wasn't strong enough.
Harvard encouraged students to find out why they were rejected for things, since the feedback might be helpful in the future. I was the good little girl who did what I was told, so I dutifully asked why I was rejected.
I was surprised to learn that it wasn't because my application wasn't strong enough. The reason I wasn't chosen as Harvard's nominee was that the Alice Freeman Palmer Fellowship is a scholarship for women. The committee reasoned that women don't normally do math, so the national committee would most likely choose among nominees in fields with many women, such as English or History. The Harvard committee thought there was no point in selecting me, since they assumed a mathematician wouldn't make the cut.
That afternoon, at tea in the math department common room, I ran into math grad student Lisa Mantini. I told her why I was rejected for the fellowship.
Lisa told me that an Alice Freeman Palmer Fellowship had funded her first year in grad school. The national committee had awarded her the fellowship, even though she was a mathematician.
I was used to being discriminated against for being a woman. As far as I knew, this was the first time I was discriminated against for being a mathematician.By reading background for this story, I learned that Wellesley College tried to hire Alice Freeman as a professor of mathematics in 1877 (she turned down the offer to help support her family and/or care for an ill sister). The following year, she turned down Wellesley's offer to teach Greek, but in 1879, the year her sister died, Freeman accepted their offer to head the History Department. Alice Freeman became President of Wellesley College in 1881, the youngest college president in the United States, at the age of 26.
Thursday, December 12, 2024
The Quincy Adams Wigglesworth Smith Scholarship
The Quincy Adams Wigglesworth Smith Scholarship was founded in 1792. The recipient, who should be fluent in Greek and Latin, must have the last name Smith. He must be a Harvard man who has at least three ancestors who came to America on the Mayflower, and at least one ancestor who signed the Declaration of Independence.
Wednesday, November 20, 2024
"Just read the damn bio!" or: What NOT to say to someone before their presentation
Friday, September 6, 2024
Suicide Watch
Friday, August 30, 2024
Further reminiscences of topologist Frank Adams
Friday, August 23, 2024
Conway Kibitzing in the Cambridge Common Room
Decked by Deck Transformations
Saturday, August 10, 2024
Roving Hands, Smoldering Cigarettes, and the White Slave Trade
Saturday, August 3, 2024
The Magic Word
Me: "I'd like to speak to X."Her: "Oh, she's my daughter. Alas, she left two weeks ago. Is there anything I can do to help?"Me: An explanation of how I knew X, and how I'm sorry I missed her.Her and me: More pleasantries, ending the call on good terms, feeling as if we completely understood each other, even though the only word we both understood was her daughter's name.
Saturday, July 27, 2024
The Kindness of Strangers
Saturday, July 20, 2024
Lacing up my shoe
When I was growing up, I learned on my mother's knee a song she had learned from her mother. It was sung to the same tune as Hatikvah, but with these words:
When I was single I had nothing to do.I'd sit by the window, lacing up my shoe.Now that I am married I have too much to do.I can't sit by the window, lacing up my shoe.One cries "Mama! Put me into bed!"Another cries "Mama! Give me a piece of bread!"I washed them, I fed them, I put them into bed.Then I said to my husband, "I wish I were dead."
Tuesday, February 13, 2024
What's wrong with choosing a woman?
Sunday, February 11, 2024
Staff without Passwords
Tuesday, December 26, 2023
"Your daughter will burn in Hell"
Sunday, December 17, 2023
The Statue of Jakob Herz
The 1875 statue of course had a face and a body (presumably an accurate depiction of Herz). The much smaller 1983 obelisk contained no images.