AWM We Speak: Math, Music, and "A Woman’s Life and Love”

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This will be an unusual inter-disciplinary presentation and concert, tying in themes of women in math, math in music, and music. I will talk about the unusual way that my career as a mathematician has developed and, together with mezzo-soprano Sarah Ponder I will present a new song cycle I have written on the subject. Actually, it’s an old song cycle, by Schumann, the rather outdated “A Woman’s Life and Love” for which I have written new lyrics, updated for a modern feminist. In the original poetry, the woman’s life and love consists of falling in love with a man she worships, getting married, having a baby, and then giving up on life when her husband dies. In my new version I instead describe ambitions, achievement, imposter syndrome, hostility, bullying, the feeling of not fitting in, and the possibility of transformation, of building a new path instead of trying to assimilate into the old systems. Along with describing my own experiences as a woman in math, I will talk about the math in the music, the somewhat mathematical process of re-writing the lyrics, and the way that abstraction makes things more widely applicable, both in math and in poetry, so that the themes of this talk are applicable beyond feminism, to inclusivity in general.