Her background doesn’t involve the stereotypical math camps and prodigy-like early achievements associated with brilliant mathematicians. I thought it was, like, my homework” (Wolfson 2020). In her account of her discovery, she says that she didn’t work on the problem during regular work hours because “I didn’t consider it to be real math. Piccirillo herself rejects this perception. Piccirillo’s paper on the solution was published in a prestigious math journal soon after the perception that she was a bit of a genius, a “hotshot” (Wolfson 2020), began to take hold.ĭr. She shared her discovery with a professor in her home department at The University of Texas, who, after being initially skeptical, became extremely excited about her discovery.
Within one week, largely in her spare time, she had determined that the knot was not slice.
This involved using techniques she was using in another field of topology, rather than those that had been used for decades to tackle it. Piccirillo learned of the problem at a conference she attended and quickly saw a possible way to solve it. This was the only such knot for which the question of sliceness had not been determined - the puzzle remained unresolved for more than 50 years.ĭr. There are only a couple hundred specialists doing this in the world, and not even all of them can” (Wolfson 2020). Piccirillo’s discovery put it, “Don’t worry if you are unable to conjure such a higher-dimension image for yourself. This is the kind of problem that tends to be seen as the territory of geniuses - as one journalistic account of Dr. The problem is a significant one for four-dimensional topology, involving thinking about three-dimensional spheres that can be viewed as the skin of a four-dimensional sphere. The so-called “Conway knot problem” involved the question of whether one of the many knots with 12 or fewer crossings possessed the quality known as “slice” (Klarreich 2020). Lisa Piccirillo, Ph.D., now an assistant professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, solved a vexing problem in knot theory in 2018 while still a graduate student. It is, therefore, significant that a young female mathematician who made a remarkable breakthrough in the field of mathematical topography challenges the view that breakthroughs like hers require genius. The gender gap in math has been static for a number of years, with women earning fewer than 30% of mathematics doctoral degrees in 2018, although that same year, women earned 52% of all doctoral degrees (American Physical Society 2020). Mathematics is one of the fields in which genius is seen as an important element in success and in which women continue to be significantly underrepresented.
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