The Effect of Gender in the Publication Patterns in Mathematics

Despite the increasing number of women graduating in mathematics, a systemic gender imbalance persists and is signified by a pronounced gender gap in the distribution of active researchers and professors. Especially at the level of university faculty, women mathematicians continue being drastically underrepresented, decades after the first affirmative action measures have been put into place. A solid publication record is of paramount importance for securing permanent positions. Thus, the question arises whether the publication patterns of men and women mathematicians differ in a significant way. Making use of the zbMATH database, one of the most comprehensive metadata sources on mathematical publications, we analyze the scholarly output of ~150,000 mathematicians from the past four decades whose gender we algorithmically inferred. We focus on development over time, collaboration through coautorships, presumed journal quality and distribution of research topics -- factors known to have a strong impact on job perspectives. We report significant differences between genders which may put women at a disadvantage when pursuing an academic career in mathematics.Comment: 24 pages, 12 figure

A sharp growth condition for a fast escaping spider's web

We show that the fast escaping set $A(f)$ of a transcendental entire function $f$ has a structure known as a spider's web whenever the maximum modulus of $f$ grows below a certain rate. We give examples of entire functions for which the fast escaping set is not a spider's web which show that this growth rate is best possible. By our earlier results, these are the first examples for which the escaping set has a spider's web structure but the fast escaping set does not. These results give new insight into a conjecture of Baker and a conjecture of Eremenko

Brushing the hairs of transcendental entire functions

Let f be a hyperbolic transcendental entire function of finite order in the Eremenko-Lyubich class (or a finite composition of such maps), and suppose that f has a unique Fatou component. We show that the Julia set of $f$ is a Cantor bouquet; i.e. is ambiently homeomorphic to a straight brush in the sense of Aarts and Oversteegen. In particular, we show that any two such Julia sets are ambiently homeomorphic. We also show that if f\in\B has finite order (or is a finite composition of such maps), but is not necessarily hyperbolic, then the Julia set of f contains a Cantor bouquet. As part of our proof, we describe, for an arbitrary function f\in\B, a natural compactification of the dynamical plane by adding a "circle of addresses" at infinity.Comment: 19 pages. V2: Small number of minor corrections made from V

Baker's conjecture for functions with real zeros

Baker's conjecture states that a transcendental entire functions of order less than 1/2 has no unbounded Fatou components. It is known that, for such functions, there are no unbounded periodic Fatou components and so it remains to show that they can also have no unbounded wandering domains. Here we introduce completely new techniques to show that the conjecture holds in the case that the transcendental entire function is real with only real zeros, and we prove the much stronger result that such a function has no orbits consisting of unbounded wandering domains whenever the order is less than 1. This raises the question as to whether such wandering domains can exist for any transcendental entire function with order less than 1. Key ingredients of our proofs are new results in classical complex analysis with wider applications. These new results concern: the winding properties of the images of certain curves proved using extremal length arguments, growth estimates for entire functions, and the distribution of the zeros of entire functions of order less than 1

The Historical Context of the Gender Gap in Mathematics

This chapter is based on the talk that I gave in August 2018 at the ICM in Rio de Janeiro at the panel on "The Gender Gap in Mathematical and Natural Sciences from a Historical Perspective". It provides some examples of the challenges and prejudices faced by women mathematicians during last two hundred and fifty years. I make no claim for completeness but hope that the examples will help to shed light on some of the problems many women mathematicians still face today

The effect of gender in the publication patterns in mathematics

Despite the increasing number of women graduating in mathematics, a systemic gender imbalance persists and is signified by a pronounced gender gap in the distribution of active researchers and professors. Especially at the level of university faculty, women mathematicians continue being drastically underrepresented, decades after the first affirmative action measures have been put into place. A solid publication record is of paramount importance for securing permanent positions. Thus, the question arises whether the publication patterns of men and women mathematicians differ in a significant way. Making use of the zbMATH database, one of the most comprehensive metadata sources on mathematical publications, we analyze the scholarly output of ∼150,000 mathematicians from the past four decades whose gender we algorithmically inferred. We focus on development over time, collaboration through coautorships, presumed journal quality and distribution of research topics—factors known to have a strong impact on job perspectives. We report significant differences between genders which may put women at a disadvantage when pursuing an academic career in mathematics

Tree map plots of women's share across MSC 2010 classes

Hierarchical maps visualising the share of women authors resp. women's publications in zbMATH across the MSC 2010 classes on level 1 and 2. Each rectangle represents a mathematical class and displays the corresponding name and code within the MSC 2010; its size is proportional to the number of authors resp. publications in that field, and the darker the color, the larger the share of women resp. their publications in that field. Detailed information can be obtained using the hover; a right-click allows to get back from MSC level 2 to level 1. Note that the interactive feature requires the activation of JavaScript