Women Mathemeticians (Profiles in Mathematics) by Padma Venkatraman

Women Mathemeticians (Profiles in Mathematics) Reviews

• 
  Emma S.

  Women Mathematicians is one of those books that you either politely appreciate or politely turn down. Six women mathematicians and their work are duly described throughout the book. It is easy to recognize that their work was important, but this Padma Venkatraman book didn't always recognize this. Overall, this book was hard to follow, organized chronologically but put together in an unstable way.
  
  Something that I noticed a lot of was repetition. The most prominent example of this was that the entry for Sonya Korvin-Krukovsky Kovalevsky kept using quotes. Over. And. Over. Again. It eventually stopped, but through the remainder of the book I caught myself checking to see if any quotes were too long. The book was also neither a biography nor a math book, as it focused on mostly the math aspects of these women’s lives. If it was a biography, then it would have gone into more depth about the women themselves, not just the fraction of their lives observing mathematics. However, if it was a math book, then it would actually explain what these women were studying. I felt that because of this, I didn’t really know what to expect towards the beginning.
  
  I would recommend this book to extremely erudite fourth- and fifth- graders, only because the target audience was not clear to me. It is written in a sense that fourth graders can understand, but its subject is in a sense that adults can understand.
• 
  Claire Horn

  i love learning ab these types of things.