For our first AWM Book Club meeting of Fall 2025, we read the chapter “Mathematical Institutions and the ‘In’ of the Association for Women in Mathematics” from AWM’s 50th anniversary collection Fifty Years of Women in Mathematics: Reminiscences, History, and Visions for the Future of AWM, the full text of which is available through Springer.
The author of the piece, Dr. Michael Barany, is a Senior Lecturer in the History of Science at the University of Edinburgh. He researches “the history of modern mathematics (broadly construed)” and teaches “the history of science (very broadly construed) and social studies of mathematical sciences (particularly the aspects that are relevant for emerging mathematicians).” His contributions to the sociology of mathematics have earned him recognition in the world of mathematics; notably, he is one of the only male authors in this collection.
Barany’s article in 50 Years of Women in Mathematics focuses on what t means to be “in” mathematics. He begins,
As the AWM’s founders recognized, there is a great difference between doing mathematics and being in mathematics. Women have been doing mathematics—learning, teaching, creating, enjoying, applying, and more—for as long as there has been mathematics. Yet they have only sometimes in this history been doing so from within, as recognized and validated participants in mathematics as an organized collective endeavor.
The article served as the basis for discussion on:
- Doing mathematics versus being a mathematician (belonging in the field)
- The perception of women as being legitimate spectators, but not originators, of knowledge
- Explicit and implicit rules discouraging or limiting women’s full participation in the field
- The minimization of women contributions, administrative and scholarly, to mathematics
- The importance of visibility and representation