Haven't done a proper historical thread in a while, so....

Ever wondered how mathematics got to be a "young man's game"?

Let's have a look... 1/

This thread is based on a forthcoming book chapter in a volume on gender and embodiment in scholarly personae that I edited with Kirsti Niskanen, coming out at the end of this year.
Preprint of my chapter here: http://mbarany.com/Barany-YoungMansGame-preprint.pdf 2/

Thanks to @ncecire in particular for helping me sharpen the analysis of puerility and boyhood in mathematics, and to the Scientific Personae in Cultural Encounters project that Kirsti directed. 3/

And also shout-out to @AWMmath ; I've been working on adapting a version of this argument for their very exciting 50th anniversary celebration volume, using this thread to think through that a bit too. 4/

The most famous claim that mathematics was a "young man's game" was in GH Hardy's 1940 Mathematician's Apology. 5/

Hardy often gets read as this timeless commentator on the nature of mathematics, but historians know to recognize him as a very peculiar creature of a very peculiar historical context. 6/

For our purposes, the most important aspects are that Hardy was a product of the Cambridge Tripos system of undergraduate math training, a major critic of that system (which he found distastefully competitive), and a pacifist surrounded by war. 7/

Before we get to why that matters, you might be wondering, wasn't mathematics always primarily the pasttime of young men?
Nope. Not even close. 8/

This is not the thread for *ALL OF GENDER AND AGE IN THE HISTORY OF MATHEMATICS* but suffice it to say that the past is full of contexts where mathematics was identified with young women, old women, young men, old men, and combinations thereof 9/

My favorite counterexample, though, is @maxmazzotti 's analysis of the life and mathematics of Maria Gaetana Agnesi, e.g. this lovely short essay https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/rise-fall-filosofessa/ 10/

Also pays to remember that the leading English-language mathematics journal of the 18th century was the Ladies' Diary, where readers of all genders joined in expressions of mathematical creativity that were seen as essentially female. See @profwernimont and others on this. 11/

Math starts to get locked into maleness in the late 18th century as certain scholars in certain places see their mastery of new and especially difficult kinds of math as a way to claim power and privilege. 12/

The late-18th / early-19th century re-gendering of mathematics is one of the better-studied parts of math history. Joan Richards, Mary Terrall, and Andrew Warwick have been three really important authors for my own understanding of this. 13/

To make a long and rich story short and tweetable, certain kinds of technical math become ways of sorting people in the 19th century, so get reconfigured to reinforce other markers of class and privilege. 14/

And that's what gets us back to Hardy. As Warwick, @JoyMLRankin , and others have discussed, the Cambridge Tripos was a major engine and product of the male-gendering of 19th century math. See Joy's fantastic @ladyxscience essay https://thenewinquiry.com/blog/lady-science-no-26-pt-2-lady-wranglers/ 15/

Hardy was trained in this super-concentrated bubble where technical paper-based math exams became for quite accidental historical reasons the key way of sorting which young Cambridge men were the best (young-malest) 16/

Even so, if you looked around the mathematical world at the time Hardy was trained, you would not (with some key exceptions that @amiralex has examined in detail) see young men held up as paragons of mathematics. 17/

Young men were seen as capable of making creative contributions to mathematics, but you'd still put your stock in an aging Poincaré or Hilbert before any of the flash-in-the-pan whippersnappers who would later be celebrated for youthful brilliance. 18/

"Young man's game" as an expression wasn't super commonplace when Hardy was training in the Cambridge Tripos, despite all the young male games associated with math there. 19/

The phrase "young man's game" catches on during the Great War, when Hardy (an antiwar mathematician who has a lot of happy contacts with German colleagues) doesn't exactly see eye-to-eye with his countrymen about all these young men getting sent off to die in the trenches 20/

"Young man's game" takes off again in popular usage around World War 2, so Hardy is writing in a context where the phrase is especially associated with the tragedy of war. Hardy's usage has to be understood as tinged with regret. 21/

But something else is happening in the decades leading up to Hardy's 1940 apology that will make his pronouncement look a lot more like a sociological generalization than a rueful reflection. 22/

That something is: philanthropic fellowship funding!
The 1920s and 30s are this golden age for people who got wealthy in finance and industry to use their wealth to remake science.
You may have heard of Guggenheim Fellowships, e.g. 23/

I've written a bit about how fellowship officers learned to see the world in some very distinctive ways:
* https://www.history-culture-modernity.org/articles/592/ 
* http://mbarany.com/ThreeNames.pdf 
* https://physicstoday.scitation.org/action/showDoPubSecure?doi=10.1063%2FPT.6.4.20180320a&format=full 24/

The key here is that science fellowship granters saw fellowships as an investment: they were not trying to give money to the best mathematicians, but rather invest money in a way to have the greatest long-term impact even after the funding stops. 25/

As far as I can tell, historically, the key driver of interest in young male mathematicians is not mathematicians themselves but these philanthropic funders, starting in the 1920s and 1930s. 26/

Mathematical philanthropists needed investments who would have long careers ahead of them. That meant they needed to show early reserach promise, and also be able to build careers amidst all the sexism and bias that surrounded them. 27/

Given how funding and resources worked in mathematics in the 1920s and beyond, this became a kind of self-fulfilling principle. The young men who received fellowships got intellectual and career opportunities that others didn't have. 28/

So the people who got the biggest boost toward the top of the mathematics profession were precisely the young men lifted by investment-thinking in view of societal bias. 29/

Thus, at precisely the time "young man's game" has become a way to lament the promising lives lost to war, new funding patterns are helping other promising lives launch their careers. 30/

That's the key takeaway: coincidence + funding change = lasting myth.

Much more, including what the "game" part and play have to do with it, in my full chapter. 31/31 https://twitter.com/MBarany/status/1291088259213393921

Almost forgot to mention: also read the whole chapter for a whole discussion of the "young man"-ness of @Betty_Bourbaki occupying an "old man" persona, and a conclusion pointing to the radical potential of @Xenofeminism 32/21