The Humanity Behind Science -- Mathematician Ingrid Daubechies

One role the Veblen House could play in a town so filled with vaunted institutions of higher learning is to make scientists better known as people. They tend to be presented in the media as remote figures stripped of personality, speaking about weighty subjects from their domain of rationality. As civilization has increasingly veered towards self-destruction, first with the nuclear arms race and now with a headlong radicalizing of the climate, scientists are primarily seen in the role of sounding the alarm. Caring people in a careless world, they are cast in the predictable, sober role of expressing concern while the rest of humanity goes its merry, scary way. Having grown up among scientists, I was able to see them as people who brought incredible perseverance, creativity, joy and humor to their study of the nature of things. 

One piece of recent writing that captures that side of science was Siobhan Roberts' portrait of Belgian mathematician Ingrid Daubechies, who in 2004 became Princeton University's first female full professor of mathematics. In her career, first in Belgium, then in the U.S., she has developed mathematical tools that have helped make possible the visual feast of the digital age, and she has even shown how artificial intelligence could be used to conserve and restore iconic artworks.

Entitled "The Godmother of the Digital Image," the article gives a portrait of Daubechies as optimistic, generous, creative, and fun-loving. 

The optimism perhaps comes from being able to solve problems others cannot:

"She revels in finding meaningful and practical problems — and solutions — where other mathematicians assume there are none."

And there's generosity in the way she uses this capacity to help her students:  

“I called her the deus ex machina adviser,” says Cynthia Rudin, a Duke computer scientist who is one of her former Ph.D. students. “When you’re in the depths of despair, your project has crashed and burned and you have almost proven that what you’re trying to do is impossible, Ingrid comes along and pulls you out of the pit of doom, and you can keep going.”

A mathematician can more easily think, and act, outside the box. How many people do you know who would throw a big shindig on their 64th birthday rather than their 65th, because 64 is a more compelling number, being a power of 2? 

"Daubechies booked a venue, a caterer, a troupe of majorette dancers known for farce — and then at the party made a surprise appearance in the baton-twirling cancan line, disguised in makeup and a tutu."

Along with her periodic "cathartic weeding in her garden," one of Daubechies' mottos, “Math can help! As always!”, reminds me of a letter about Oswald Veblen from 1992 in Princeton's Town Topics newspaper:

He and his friends spent Sunday afternoons clearing the poison ivy from the bank of the canal. He advocated washing vigorously with yellow soap after this. "You bet! "as he was prone to say. - ELIZABETH G MENZIES 926 Kingston Road

The letter writer, Elizabeth G. Menzies, turns out to have been the first female official photographer for Princeton University, who made a name for herself with a photo of Albert Einstein that appeared in a 1939 issue of Scientific American. 

Roberts' article also delves into Daubechies' efforts to help other women overcome institutional bias and gain deserved prominence in the field of mathematics. Veblen took on this role in the 1930s, helping the great mathematician Emmy Noether get positions at Bryn Mawr College and the Institute for Advanced Study. 

While it's easy to see mathematics as intimidatingly complex, it is not uncommon among mathematicians of Daubechies' caliber to find in their work an underlying elegance and beauty. Describing how she found a practical application for wavelets without sacrificing the beauty of the original concept, she said,

“It is something that mathematicians often take for granted, that a mathematical framework can be really elegant and beautiful, but that in order to use it in a true application, you have to mutilate it: Well, they shrug, That’s life — applied mathematics is always a bit dirty. I didn’t agree with this point of view.”

Thanks to a gifted writer like Siobhan Roberts, people can begin to see how much humanity and passion a scientist can bring to her work.

Other posts about great women in math and science:

2017: A Memorable Year for Women Mathematicians

Vera Rubin: The Courage of Her Curiosity

Math Writ Large in Hidden Figures

On Juneteenth, A Post From the Past

Just two days ago, President Joe Biden signed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act. The title suggests that we can all feel more free because of Juneteenth. Though it primarily commemorates the emancipation of enslaved African Americans, it's also been described as serving "as a moment to honor and celebrate black excellence." I can relate to that, as a jazz musician, having spent long and pleasurable hours listening to and transcribing the solos of many of the greats: Lester Young, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Don Byas, Dexter Gordon, Wardell Gray, Sonny Rollins. 

Now, immersed in the history and the restorational logistics of Veblen House, what connection can be found between African American excellence and the Veblens, whose ancestry is Norwegian and English? 

The question sends us back to the VeblenHouse.org archives for a 2017 post entitled "Math Writ Large in Hidden Figures." It's a story of surprising connections that begins like this: 

"A friend likes to say that "all roads lead to Veblen House". On a hunch, I traced the mathematical road leading back from Katherine G. Johnson, one of three extraordinary black women mathematicians in the movie Hidden Figures, and sure enough, it led back in multiple ways to Oswald Veblen."

The rest of the story is at this link. 

Vera Rubin--The Courage of Her Curiosity

A friend sent an article from the Atlantic Magazine announcing that a telescope is being renamed in honor of the great astronomer Vera Rubin. That article in turn has led to autobiographies by Ruben and another great astronomer, Margaret Burbidge, both of whose careers intersected with my father's.

Largely government funded, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory is the first national U.S. telescope to be named after a woman. Though the story has no direct connection to Oswald Veblen, it is congruent with his heritage and legacy. In the late 1800s, when women had far fewer options for pursuing higher education, Veblen's parents and grandparents sent all their children to college, daughters and sons alike. One generation attended Carlton College, the next the University of Iowa, which has the distinction of being the first public co-educational university in the U.S..

Oswald would take that familial heritage into his career in Princeton, where he used his position of influence to help the great mathematician Emmy Noether, displaced after the Nazi takeover in Germany find employment in the U.S.. Veblen took the lead in helping find her a position at Bryn Mawr and inviting her to be a Visitor at the IAS. By that time, 1933, Veblen had left Princeton University to become the first faculty member at the Institute for Advanced Study, which was non-discriminatory from its inception. Princeton University, on the other hand, was men-only until 1975. When Vera Rubin expressed an interest in attending Princeton for graduate studies in 1948, the university would not even send her an application. Princeton ultimately came around, giving her an honorary degree in 2005.

Vera Rubin, who was a lifelong advocate for women in science, was herself inspired by a woman astronomer born 110 years earlier than herself, Maria Mitchell. Demonstrating the power of history and legacy, Rubin reportedly chose to attend Vassar College because Mitchell had been a professor of astronomy there 80 years prior.

The story of Vera Rubin has its most direct connection here to my own family's history. The first connection I discovered is geographical. Cerro Pachon, the mountain in northern Chile where the Vera C. Rubin Observatory is nearing completion, is only a half hour from Cerro Tololo, where I spent some free-range halcyon days as a boy, exploring the desert and tossing rocks off the edge of the mountain while my father, W. A. Hiltner, was on extended observing runs.

Another connection is also through my father's career, which intersected to some extent with Vera Rubin's, as in this 1971 photo with my father on the left and Vera Rubin's on the right (courtesy of the AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Dorothy Crawford Collection), and to a much greater extent with the work of astronomer Margaret Burbidge. A NY Times obituary from 2016 states that "Dr. Rubin, along with Margaret Burbidge ..., was a “guiding light” for a generation of female astronomers."

If it's possible to encapsulate major contributions, "Rubin’s work in the 1970s provided convincing evidence that dark matter existed," while Margaret Burbidge and her husband and fellow astronomer Geoff Burbidge, "were best known for their work in the mid-1950s describing how stars synthesize nearly all the chemical elements in the universe, from carbon and iron to lead and uranium."

The Burbidges, originally from England, along with two other great scientists, Fred Hoyle and William Fowler, stirred things up in the astronomy world with their progressive thinking. Their names were very familiar in our household, growing up.

In reading the interviews and autobiographies of Vera Rubin and Margaret Burbidge, I was gratified to discover the role my father played in Margaret's career early on. This was at a time when many institutions of higher education considered astronomy a men-only profession. Margaret's application in 1945 for a Carnegie Fellowship in Pasadena was rejected due to her being a woman, and in 1948 Vera Rubin, as mentioned, was not even allowed to apply for graduate studies at Princeton University. The largest telescope, at Mt. Palomar, would be unavailable for women until Rubin broke through that barrier in the mid-60s, famously taping the figure of a skirt on the bathroom door to create a women's bathroom.

There were no such restrictions at the University of Chicago's department of astronomy, and its two renowned observatories in Wisconsin and Texas. My father was on the faculty at U. of Chicago, based at Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin. In 1951, he was able to arrange funding for Margaret to take a position there, and later came up with a way for her to get coveted observing time on the 82" telescope at McDonald's Observatory in Texas. From her autobiographical essay:

Before the cold Yerkes winter set in, Geoff and I prepared a program to submit for McDonald observing time ... But the time for submission was past; since we wanted winter time when the December Milky Way was up, we were too late. Here the never-to-be-forgotten kindness of Al Hiltner came to our rescue. He had set me to work on prevention of internal reflections and scattered light in a spectrometer for calibrating coude plates at McDonald, and he had a month (I believe) scheduled for photometry at McDonald. He said there would be many nonphotometric nights during this period, and if Geoff and I could get ourselves to McDonald ... we could have the non-photometric nights for spectroscopy ...

Gratifying, too, was reading Burbidge's and Rubin's descriptions of their burgeoning curiosity as children. It brought back memories of growing up among astronomers who loved their work, in a family where curiosity and creativity were valued. Science for me has always been about beauty and exploring the magnificence of creation. 

 Vera Rubin describes her curiosity about the world and her active imagination:

As a youngster, more questions followed. Why did the pictures on my bedroom wall jump back and forth on each side of my finger as I lay in bed blinking my eyes? How did water drops in a stream know on which side of a rock to pass? Could I, a lazy child, devise a street on which one sidewalk went uphill and one side downhill, so that I could always walk downhill? A little later, the questions were more conventional. How many license plates can be made with three numbers and two letters? This puzzle I solved as we drove to our new home in Washington, D.C.

Margaret Burbidge describes it this way:

At age 4, before beginning school, my first view of the beauty of stars in the summer sky during a night-time boat crossing from England to France was the earliest step toward a lifetime love of astronomy. Then I developed an early interest in arithmetic and in numbers (especially large ones with many powers of ten to write out and contemplate); this began in my first years in school. I had learnt to read before going to school, so books were a continuing delight. My parents gave me books written for children on all the natural sciences, and reading these was coupled with both my mother's and father's willingness to show me and tell me about the wonders of the seashore, of flowers, plants, and trees (both my sister and I became passionate tree climbers throughout Hampstead Heath, near which we lived). My love of flowers is lifelong, and has been inherited by my own daughter.

And later in her youth:

When I was 12 or 13 years old, my grandfather gave me Sir James Jeans' popular books on astronomy. Suddenly, I saw my fascination with the stars, born at age 4, linked to my other delight, large numbers. That the nearest star is 26,000,000,000,000 miles away revived those excitements of my first school years (although falling short of my then favorite contemplation, 1 followed by 36 zeros). I decided then and there that the occupation I most wanted to engage in "when I was grown up" was to determine the distances of the stars. My mother recalled telling me, as I lay on my stomach on the floor reading the wonders described by Jeans, that it was bedtime, and that I pleaded for a little more time: "Mum, it's so exciting!" 

Combined with the intellectual and emotional delight--and resonating with Veblen's hiking and woodchopping ways--was the pleasure Margaret found in the physicality of exploration, whether climbing trees as a kid or spending nights in the dome of an observatory with the heavens above. My father came to astronomy after growing up on a farm, and brought that appetite for physical work and resilience against the elements with him, donning insulated underwear for long nights in the Wisconsin winter, where the best nights for observing were also the coldest.

Margaret put it this way:

I often think about the joys of work in an open dome, under the stars, next to the telescope, joys denied to most younger astronomers and students who must sit in a warm console room, facing a television guiding screen and many complex computer interfaces, well removed from the telescope itself. 

Smuggling that avid curiosity and sense of wonder into adulthood not only enriched their lives. It likely helped Vera Rubin and Margaret Burbidge break through (or find ways around) the barriers they encountered as women in a profession dominated by men. One sentence in Vera Rubin's autobiography stood out. In 1960, Rubin had just arrived in the Netherlands for an International Summer Course in Science. There she heard lectures from some of the world's greatest astronomers--Jan Oort and the Burbidges among them. "Initially," she wrote, "Oort terrified me, but I soon had too many questions to stay silent."

Thus the title of this post: The Courage of Her Curiosity. In the 21st century, when so many people hold convictions, sure they are right when surely they are wrong, we would do well to turn to curiosity as a better source of courage.

(Vera Rubin posing with Kitt Peak Observatory in the background--an institution my father played an important role in developing, and where a telescope bears his name. It was at Kitt Peak in 1968 that Vera Rubin and Kent Ford made discoveries that would transform our understanding of the universe. Thanks to AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives for these photos.)

2017: A Memorable Year for Women Mathematicians

Before the cascading events of this fall put the national focus on women in the workplace, it was already a significant year for appreciating women and their contributions to mathematics.

Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson
The movie Hidden Figures, released just days before 2017 began, tells of the critical role three black female mathematicians played in the U.S. space program. A hunch and some research uncovered a Veblen connection to that wonderful story.

This hidden role of women has played out repeatedly in the history of mathematics and computers. It's commonly said that though early computing machines were largely designed by men, it was the women who figured out how to actually run them. Women with keen mathematical ability had already proved themselves as the first computers, whether for NASA or for Veblen's ballistics work for the U.S. military during the World Wars. A little research yielded a story from my little home town of Williams Bay, Wisconsin, home of Yerkes Observatory. According to Wikipedia, Chandreskhar, a colleague of my father's and a future Nobel Prize winner, in the 1940s

"had used top performing female high school students from Williams Bay, Lake Geneva, Elkhorn and Burlington, Wisconsin to calculate immensely difficult mathematical equations entirely by long hand, and found that their abilities and vigilance were unparalleled."

Cathleen Synge Morawetz
There's also a Veblen connection to another great female mathematician, Cathleen Synge Morawetz, who died this past August. A writeup on the American Mathematical Society website tells of her distinguished career, including many firsts for a female mathematician. At age 90, she and her husband made a donation to significantly increase funding for the Veblen Prize in geometry, out of gratitude for a kindness Oswald showed to her father a long time ago. The touching story is taken from an AMS article.

"This long association with the AMS played a part in her decision, in celebration of her 90th birthday last year, to make a major donation to the Society. The gift from her and her husband, Herbert Morawetz, significantly increased the size of the long-underfunded Oswald Veblen Prize Fund, bringing it on a par with other AMS prize funds. Veblen was a good friend of Morawetz’s father, John Lighton Synge. How this friendship began is recounted in Synge’s article “For the 100th birthday of the American Mathematical Society”, which appeared in A Century of Mathematics in America: Part 1, edited by Peter Duren (AMS, 1988). The article is a written version of a talk Synge gave at the AMS Centennial Celebration in 1988. 

In the article, he recalls an AMS meeting he attended in December 1921 in Toronto. He had come to Toronto from Dublin the year before and found few colleagues with mathematical interests similar to his own. His encounter with Veblen at that AMS meeting and the kindness and consideration Veblen showed were important to Synge as he made his way in mathematics in a new land. At the time Synge wrote the article, he was 91 years old, the same age his daughter is now. One hears in his article an echo of the lively intellect and warmth of Cathleen Synge Morawetz. For those qualities and for her many contributions to mathematics and to the profession, she has evoked great fondness in the mathematical community."

After getting contact info from friend and distinguished mathematician Joe Kohn, I tried to reach out to her this past March to let her know about our initiative to save the Veblen House, but was unable to reach her. A video interview of her, late in life, tells of how her mentor at NYU, Richard Courant, had also been a supporter of Emmy Noether (see below) in Goettingen, how becoming pregnant actually hastened her getting a PhD, and how she was for a time a trustee at Princeton University. It appears that Veblen assisted not only Moravetz's father, but also played a quiet role in laying the groundwork for her own career. A book named "Hilbert-Courant", by Constance Reid, describes Veblen's role in encouraging Courant to take a position at New York University in 1933.

Maryam Mirzakhani

2017 also saw the loss at age 40 of mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani. She was the first and thus far only female mathematician to win the Fields Medal. Born in Iran, her brief but brilliant career as a professor began at Princeton before moving to Stanford.

Marina Ratner
She died this past July, after defying conventional expectations of a mathematician's trajectory by doing her best mathematical work in her later years, after turning 40.

Emmy Noether
Last but not least, and more appropriately first and most, Emmy Noether gained much deserved recognition in 2017 as part of a historical initiative at the Institute for Advanced Study entitled A Refuge for Scholars. Like Einstein, who called her one of the greatest mathematicians of all time, she was displaced by the Nazi takeover of Germany. It was Veblen who took the lead in finding her a position at Bryn Mawr and inviting her to be a Visitor at the IAS. Despite her talents being commensurate with male mathematicians of the time, or of all time, her career options were limited, as was her salary. She died in 1935 after complications from surgery. This poster about her has been on display at the IAS Fuld Hall.

Memories of Elizabeth Veblen

J David Donahue, of Quantico, VA, left a wonderful comment on a previous post that I'd like to share more widely. It gives us some insight into the interior of the Veblen House and the last decade of Elizabeth's life there. Thanks so much to Mr. Donahue, who retired as a Lieutenant Colonel in the Marines, for sharing these childhood memories. (Note: The photo is from the 1950s, and is the only one we have of the Veblen House interior when the Veblens were still living there.)

I was Mrs Veblen's paperboy for a year, 1965-1966. I never received payment from her but I did not care. She never could find cash and instead tried to pay me with old magazines or with little boxes of matches. I often sat with her in her living room and listened to her stories. At first I found her difficult to follow, to understand. Soon I looked at the pictures on the mantel. Although only 11 or 12 I easily recognized pictures of Woodrow Wilson with, as became evident, Mrs Veblen and her husband and others. She seemed to always have a fire going in the fireplace. The home had the aroma of a hunting lodge. I loved visiting with her when I made my bi-monthly visits to get paid. She was lonely and eager to have company. She was wonderful to talk to and I loved her voice and accent. I knew she must be a kind person. I hope the Veblen home is preserved. It is a remnant of an era long gone. Years later, after a career in the Marine Corps and federal law enforcement, I look back and wish I had more conversations with Mrs Veblen.

In email correspondence, Mr. Donahue shared more of his memories of Elizabeth and the house. This would have been five years after Oswald died, and gives a portrait of an elderly woman who had had a remarkable, active, highly social life, now with unaccustomed solitude and the challenges of aging.

She had two large, stuffed upholstered chairs in front of the fireplace. They faced the fireplace and its adjacent wall, not at a 90 degree angle, but closer to 45. She would sit in one and I in the other and she would tell stories. There was a dark oriental rug and bookshelves. There were lots of books in the room, and a small table next to her chair with a cup and saucer. She liked to drink hot tea and many times offered me tea. Her train of thought was hard to follow and she did not always speak clearly. She did most of the talking. She always had a shawl around her shoulders and she moved slowly, stooped over, and shuffling when she walked. 

Because there was always a fire in the fireplace, the home smelled like the hunting and fishing club my grandfather belonged to in the 1950s and 1960s. It smelled smoky, but was not overpowering. It was a good aroma. A warm, cozy aroma. I think that I mentioned the photos on the mantel above the fireplace. As an eleven year old, I had already read a lot of American history and recognized group pictures of Woodrow Wilson with a handful of other people. I remember asking Mrs. Veblen why pictures of the former president were on the mantel and she said that she and her husband knew Mr. Wilson. I was impressed! 

Prior to my middle school years I spent time in Herrontown Woods. My friends and I found several streams and flooded areas that provided good frog breeding grounds. I remember finding masses of frog eggs in several places where the water was deep and slow moving. We went home and read about frogs and returned a week or two later to find the tadpoles. It was a cool place to learn about nature. 

As a boy I liked to listen to my grandparents tell stories, so it was easy for me to sit with Mrs. Veblen. My visits sometimes lasted 20 or 30 minutes, certainly not the norm for a paperboy attempting to get paid. Usually, transactions with my other customers lasted a minute or two on a cold front porch or doorstep. After my one year as an eleven/twelve year old paperboy, I knew that the business world would not be my livelihood. Although she did not pay me, I did not have the heart to cut off her paper subscription. As a child, I did not know much about psychology or aging, but I could tell Mrs. Veblen was not totally coherent. I suppose now we might call it dementia. But I did recognize that she was kind and needed companionship. I knew that I spent way too much time at her home, but we both enjoyed each other's company.  

When the spring of my 7th grade year arrived, I had to quit the route. In 1966, the Trenton Times was an afternoon newspaper and I had to choose between playing catcher on the Princeton Middle School baseball team or being a paperboy. I chose baseball. Occasionally, in my secondary school and college years I wondered what happened to Mrs. Veblen. Then a few weeks ago I read in the Town Topics online about a group trying to save the Veblen home. From there I found the blog. I hope your group is able to preserve the homestead. It provides a connection to the past, to a special time in our country's intellectual history, and the history of Princeton.

Math Writ Large in Hidden Figures

A friend likes to say that "all roads lead to Veblen House". On a hunch, I traced the mathematical road leading back from Katherine G. Johnson, one of three extraordinary black women mathematicians in the movie Hidden Figures, and sure enough, it led back in multiple ways to Oswald Veblen.

The movie itself is deeply moving and, despite the liberties it would appear to take for the sake of high drama, remarkably accurate and true to historical fact. Figuratively speaking, it sends its three main characters high into orbit, to shine in the sun, but not beyond the gravitational pull of earth.

All three main characters--Katherine G. Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson--overcome a host of obstacles facing women and blacks in 1960s Virginia to play major roles in the early days of the NASA space program and computer programming. We learn, among many things, that John Glenn refused to take that first American flight to orbit the earth until Katherine Johnson had verified the mathematics upon which the flight was based.

Oswald Veblen died in 1960, but he played a central role in developing the mathematical and computational world featured in the movie. Before there were machines called "computers", there were women called "computers" who had the patience and the smarts to do the myriad calculations required to compute trajectories. And before Alan Shepard could be the first American to soar into space in 1959, there needed to be a mathematician who could envision and accurately predict the full trajectory of his flight.

That mathematician was Katherine Johnson, and the mathematics was built on the ballistics calculations Veblen oversaw for the military at Aberdeen Proving Grounds in the first and second World Wars. Tracing Katherine G. Johnson's mathematical lineage involves finding out who her main teachers were, and who in turn taught her teachers, reaching back in time.

There's a particular passion for tracking professional lineage in mathematics, with a website devoted to the pursuit called the Mathematics Genealogy Project. Type in Oswald Veblen's name, and you find that, owing to his role as one of the "three key leaders" who "organized American mathematics" (according to Herman Goldstein), he has more than 11,000 mathematical descendants. No results came up for Katherine G. Johnson, presumably because she didn't pursue an academic career. Type in her professor at West Virginia State University, William Waldron Shieffelin Claytor--the third African American to receive a PhD in mathematics--and you find that his advisor was John Robert Kline at University of Pennsylvania.

Kline, in turn, was advised by Robert Lee Moore, who developed the "Moore method" of teaching, in which the students themselves present the material rather than being passive recipients of a lecture. Though Moore's views on race may have been influenced by his father, who fought as a Confederate in the Civil War and named his son after the Confederate general, the R.L. Moore teaching method appears to have benefitted mathematics students of all races. There's a scene in the movie in which the instructor hands Johnson the chalk and asks her to solve the problem on the blackboard in front of the class.

R.L. Moore's advisor at University of Chicago was Oswald Veblen, just before Veblen moved to Princeton in 1905. That makes Kathryn Johnson a fourth generation mathematical descendant of Veblen.

Update: An additional connection to Oswald Veblen comes through Johnson's main mentor at West Virginia State, W.W. Shieffelin Claytor, whose own brilliant career was tragically hampered by the racism he encountered. Claytor's teaching load at W. Virginia State prevented him from doing any research. Around the time that Katherine Johnson graduated (at age 18!), Veblen, who had fought long and hard to gain American mathematicians adequate time to do research, sought to bring Claytor to Princeton University, but the University did not accept "coloured persons". Four years later, Veblen offered Claytor a position at the Institute for Advanced Study, which was not subject to the university's exclusions based on race. But by that time, Claytor had apparently grown disillusioned. He "turned down the offer saying that he did not want to be a guinea pig." The heartbreaking story is told in this online biography.

Some favorite scenes in Hidden Figures are of Johnson as a young girl, feeling the excitement of math within her as she walked down a sidewalk. Mathematics is built into the incremental act of walking--something I felt as a kid counting the steps it took to cross a grassy field coming home from school--and may have been part of Veblen's love of walks in nature, an experience he insured for Princetonians by donating Herrontown Woods as Princeton's first nature preserve. In another scene in the movie, Johnson realizes that what is needed for orbital flight was not new math, but very old math, in the form of Euler's method, from the 18th century. It's interesting to speculate on whether she might have learned Euler's method from the first African American to get a mathematics PhD, Elbert Frank Cox, whose work involved "generalized Euler polynomials" and who taught at West Virginia State until 1929. The dramatic entrance of an IBM computer midway in the movie, filling a whole room and threatening the future of the female computers, brought back childhood memories of a similar machine my father used in the attic of Yerkes Observatory.

The movie caused some tearing up, particularly towards the end. Ever since experiencing that inner earthquake of my father dying--he turned his Ohio farmboy talent for mathematics into a prominent career in astronomy--there's been a channel within, geologic in feeling, through which emotion can rise to the eyes, unfettered. It's genuine emotion, but can also be manipulated to rise up by the tricks movies use to trigger a desired emotional response. To be prone to manipulation by a movie's artifice is both disconcerting and comforting. In Hidden Figures the tearing up is not only a product of the customary movie manipulation but also the deep message of equality that we carried home from the movie theater. Afterwards, researching the movie's accuracy, away from Hollywood's manipulations, the articles were as moving as the film. Here are a few, from HistoryVsHollywood, PopularMechanics, and LATimes.

Permeating the movie is the urgency of the race to space. That national urgency drove an "all hands on deck" attitude that opened cracks in oppressive views of race and gender just wide enough for the brilliance of these black women to rise, and in turn influence a nation's trajectory. Particularly in our time, when government is in the grips of a solutions-averse anti-intellectualism, it is stirring to see depicted an era when science, math and courage came together to achieve great things. Other daunting challenges, climate change being foremost, await a similar integration of national character and purpose, with similar opportunities to break through the artificial barriers that divide all nations and peoples.

Update: At the Academy Awards, Katherine Johnson had her moment in the bright lights on stage, surrounded by the three stars of the movie.

The Prominent Ancestors of Mary Marshall Ogden

Thus far, we know the women who lived at Veblen House primarily by the men in their lives and in their pasts. Elizabeth Richardson Veblen was sister of Owen Willans Richardson, who won the Nobel Prize in 1928. Her sister, Lillian, married one of Owen's students at Princeton, Clinton Davisson, who won the Nobel Prize in 1937.

Mary Marshall Ogden, who with husband JP Whiton-Stuart moved the (prefab) house to Princeton and lived in it for a time in the 1930s before selling to the Veblens, appears to have been a direct descendant of John Marshall, the fourth chief justice of the United States. At least, that's what the Nov. 16, 1964 Tucson Daily Citizen says in an obituary:

"Private funeral services for Mrs. Mary Stuart, 89, a Tucson resident for 13 years and a direct descendant of a chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, were held at noon today at her home, 2710 E. Mabel St. She died at her home Saturday. A descendant of Chief Justice John Marshall, she was the daughter of the late John R. Ogden and the late Mary Marshall Ogden of Natchez, Miss. Mrs. Stuart was the sister of the late Mrs. Pierpont Davis of Tucson. She was the mother of the late Mrs. Nelson Olcott, formerly of Tucson. She is survived by a son, Robert W. Stuart of Palm Beach, Fla., and three grandchildren."

And so another intriguing connection is made to the Veblen House. Here is a snippet on John Marshall, for those like me who are not up on that era:

John Marshall, (born Sept. 24, 1755, near Germantown [now Midland], Va.—died July 6, 1835, Philadelphia, Pa.), fourth chief justice of the United States and principal founder of the U.S. system of constitutional law. As perhaps the Supreme Court’s most influential chief justice, Marshall was responsible for constructing and defending both the foundation of judicial power and the principles of American federalism.

By uncanny coincidence, a colleague of my father shows up in a news story just above the news about Mary Stuart:

"To Speak At Dinner--Meet Dr. Gerard Kuiper, director of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona, will speak Sunday at the annual Compact Day dinner meeting of the Society of Mayflower Descendants in the State of Arizona."

An earlier post suggested that the Ogden name dates back to the Pilgrims, so the juxtaposition of Mary (Marshall Ogden) Stuart's obituary with news about the Society of Mayflower Descendants may have been intentional. Not all Pilgrims came over on the Mayflower, though. John Ogden, referred to in this article as The Wandering Pilgrim Who Helped to Settle New Jersey, came over in 1641, 20 years after the Mayflower made its voyage. This post on a genealogy forum says that no Ogdens were on the Mayflower passenger list. I'm guessing that Mary's ancestry was close enough for jazz, and for the Mayflower society.

Update: Mary turns out to be a direct 8th generation descendant of pilgrim John Ogden.

Another tidbit: According to History.com,

"The Mayflower Compact, signed by 41 English colonists on the ship Mayflower on November 11, 1620, was the first written framework of government established in what is now the United States"

Actually, the Iroquoi Nation might take exception to that statement, but lots of interesting threads here nonetheless. Now, if only we can learn something of the (later to be known as) Veblen House's voyage to Princeton, skippered by the Whiton-Stuarts!