Bad-ass woman of the day: Moon Duchin

Moon Duchin, a 1993 Westinghouse finalist, is one cool woman. After Duchin’s success in high school, she went on to Harvard to study math and kick some patriarchal ass:

[B]ut even as she pursued a fairly traditional track for a promising young mathematician, she was becoming suspicious of the traditional great “Men of Mathematics” (to quote a famous book title) concept. “Does it hinge on specific people or is it inevitable it will come out that way?” she asks. The Great Man model of a genius working alone in his garret “started to seem like it was obscuring some of the important community aspects of mathematics, and like it was controlling who would even think to enter the field,” she says. Duchin stuck it out because of her 7-year-old dream and “adolescent stubbornness,” but “it wasn’t always easy to see my way through. Meanwhile, I’d picked up an enduring interest in cultural practices and philosophical issues in science.”
So at Harvard, Duchin wound up double majoring in math and women’s studies. She did a mathematics research thesis, and also one for the women’s studies department looking at “Why the notion of genius is so attractive with thinking about math and how it functions, and what it does to math as a field,” she says. “Lots of people think this is a non-social field—would math come out differently in a society with a different social organization?” While she’s not trying to debunk the existence of genius (“there really are people you meet in math and you learn about who just synthesize things in ways that other people don’t have access to with any investment of time”), the Great Man theory “definitely stilts the narrative. A real intellectual history is harder to do but it illuminates the math very differently.”

Oh, and if that isn’t enough to win you over – Rush Limbaugh once called her a feminist ringleader in one of his trademark rants. Hot.
Thanks to David for the story!