Reply #34: Nancy Hopkins walked out [View All]

[Moe Levine]

my 2 cents is that Nancy Hopkins is a person who just looks for fights--that is her history. Summers knows that academia, today, is filled to the brim with people like her, which is why his mistake was saying anything, for anything he said was going to be used by someone for their own purposes.

I have two daughers and one son in college. We do everything we can to encourage all three to be as strong as possible in all courses. One daughter got an A in physics not long ago, and she is an advertising major. Never have we been so proud. We even have a family motto, "Those who can't do the math read."

I watch this from a distance and just shake my head--I can't see it helping my daughters--people like Nancy Hopkins just start and continue horrible images of successful women. Her "how" as Herb Cohen says, is horrible. She couldn't convince anyone with an open mind.

If she really had something to say, she should have stayed in the room and said it, it would have been reported, and we would have made progress. Instead, she made it all about her.

Being in MENSA, I used to follow the test stuff. It has always been very disturbing to many in such organizations that when you get to the really really high scores in math, most are men. I am not such a person.

We all need an answer why this was/is the case, for people with agendas will use such for their own purposes. My two cents is that some odd quirk is at work. I know that I do well on such tests because of two reasons: (1) specific written memory (I recall fairly well books I read 30 years ago, but I can't recall this mornings conversations); (2) ability to recognize patterns, of which I can say I only know of one or two people who have had a better ability. I am a walking most all day saying "this is like that," only the that happened 500 years ago.

That gets me in the 98 percentile+ However, I cannot do the math that the 99.99+ can do (1 in a 1000 or fewer). I am sure that these are the kinds of people for whom Harvard is looking to be a professor. Since math at this level is not about calculation (someone else did the calculation for Einstein), their own to be some way to fairly present the question without people going nuts. However, there isn't and that's why this fellow should have moved on