The CUNY News Wire

Two City Tech Professors Awarded NSF Grant to Nurture Emerging Female Math Scholars

March 18th, 2008

Though the number of U.S. college women majoring in mathematics continues to increase, the percentage of new female PhDs in the field has leveled out since 1999, averaging around 30 percent. A 2006 American Mathematical Society survey reported 1,245 new U.S. doctoral recipients, the highest number ever, but only 32 percent were women.

This trend disturbs two mathematics professors at New York City College of Technology (City Tech), Victoria Gitman and Delaram Kahrobaei, and they are doing all they can to change it. “The current statistics are not very encouraging,” says Kahrobaei, “especially since before 1999 there had been a marked increase in female mathematicians.”

Recently, these two professors won a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to sponsor the Second Annual New York Women in Mathematics Network (NYWIMN) Conference on the City Tech campus. The upcoming May 2 conference will concentrate on interdisciplinary research in logic, group theory and theoretical computer science. The goal of the NYWIMN conferences is to establish informal networks among female mathematicians, designed to provide young women with role models, and lead to fruitful mentoring relationships and research partnerships. “We hope that the interplay of these research topics will lead to many important collaborations and scientific discoveries,” Gitman says.