Gender and collaboration

Recently I was browsing Jerry Grossman’s beautiful Erdős Number Project website, when I came across an article by Kirsten Menger-Anderson.

She begins by attempting to determine the gender of all mathematicians who have Erdős number 1. I was a bit surprised at first. I have quite a few coauthors (261 by my count, though not quite all of these qualify for edges in the collaboration graph – the rules assert that only genuine research collaborations count, so that a jointly-written obituary or a jointly-edited research volume doesn’t count). I really had no idea how many of these are female, and it had not crossed my mind before to wonder about this.

In fact, it is a little difficult for me to produce a precise figure. Because of a combination of factors including communications technology and the Covid pandemic, there are quite a number of my recent co-authors that I have not met, and know only from email exchanges. The idea of refusing a collaboration, or even of treating a coauthor differently based on gender, is beyond my comprehension.

I will admit that, before I had a female PhD student for the first time, I was just a little bit nervous; but I believe I treated her no differently from my male students, and I hope she didn’t even notice my nervousness.

Anyway, a rough count would suggest that somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of my collaborators have been female. I have no reason to be either proud or ashamed of this; it is just what happened. I don’t choose my collaborators any more than I choose my students. All my collaborators have given me so much. Over the next years I suppose I will inevitably slow down, but I remember these encounters, whether face-to-face, by email, by Zoom, or whatever, with great pleasure.

To return to Kirsten Menger-Anderson’s article: she goes on to look at Wikipedia pages. The striking thing I noticed there is that having Erdős number 1 is not regarded as sufficient mark of distinction to save a Wikipedia page from deletion. Should it be? I have no idea, and since I don’t make the rules, it seems somewhat remote from my concerns. I have a Wikipedia page at the moment, but I don’t expect that this will always be the case.

I recorded here some time ago a talk by Dmitriy Rumynin on the so-called E_7.5, an object lying somewhere between E₇ and E₈, or perhaps I should say between numerology and Lie algebras not too far from being simple. He was asked at one point whether E_7.5 really exists. His reply was, “It is more real than I am: it has a Wikipedia page, I don’t!” In fact I see that it has now been re-named E_7½.

But the more serious question she raises, which I cannot answer is: Are females less likely to get a Wikipedia page, or more likely to have an existing page deleted, than males?