This is one of many articles about
Lisa Piccirillo who recently solved the Conway know problem.
Key excerpts related to our discussions:
Piccirillo, who is 29, grew up in Greenwood, Maine, a town with a population of less than 900. She was an excellent student and her mom taught middle school math, but there was little in her interests to suggest that she would become a world-class mathematician.
"I was an overachiever," she says. "I rode dressage. I was very active in the youth group at my church. I did drama. I was in band. I did everything." Which is another way of saying that she wasn't one of those math prodigies who's programming computers and building algorithms at age 4.
Piccirillo says one of her priorities is to help grow and broaden the mathematics community. "There certainly are many young women, people of color, non-heterosexual, or non-gender binary people who feel put at an arm's length by the institution of mathematics," she says. "It's really important to me to help mitigate that in any small ways I can." One important way to do that, she continues, is to help shatter the myth of the math prodigy."You don't have to be really 'smart' - whatever that means - to be a successful mathematician," Piccirillo says. "There's this idea that mathematicians are geniuses. A lot of them seem to be child prodigies that do these Olympiads. In fact, you don't have to come from that background at all to be very good at math and most mathematicians, including many of the really great ones, don't come from that sort of background."------------------------------
Deborah Olander
Instructor
Phillips Academy
Andover MA
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