Who is Piergiorgio Odifreddi? What is your book about stupidity and above all what do you think about the relationship between women and mathematics?
Piergiorgio Odifreddi (Cuneo, 13 July 1950) is an Italian mathematician, logician and essayist. His writings, as well as mathematics, deal with scientific divulgation, history of science, philosophy, politics, exegesis, philology, miscellaneous essay and alas of ... religion :). Odifreddi is one of a kind and is among the few logical mathematicians living to have a clear dialectic, pungent and at the same time, fun. Its most original feature is to talk about the world through the eyes of mathematics. In addition to scientific popularization, it is usual to write articles against the church, against the Pope, Padre Pio, etc. and more generally against all kinds of supernatural religious beliefs.
In his latest book Dictionary of stupidity he dedicated a section to Beppe Grillo saying: “Grillo started to say nonsense before starting to do politics.” To say: he claimed that AIDS was a hoax, that GMO kills, that the radiation from cell phones is cooking eggs, but he believes it, and this is the great difference between Grillo and a professional politician: that the politician has to tell some idiots to make votes, he tells them by conviction “.
But that’s not what I want to talk about.
Still about Grillo and his voter following he goes on to say, “I do not mean your audience is made up of idiots, it’s a bad word, I mean naive, but the fact remains that they’re people who believe in chemtrails and make battles. against detergents – it is the part of society with less cultural means to judge “.
But still, this is not what I want to talk about.
Odifreddi and Women, here! indeed! What does Prof. Odifreddi think about women? Mathematically speaking means. In private are their cabbage 🙂 … Well, there is a thin line of ironic interposed between him, mathematics and women. As a logical mathematician he judges and evaluates people (women and men, we mean) on the basis of the science in which he excels, mathematics.
Let’s begin.
Do women and men have different logical mathematical reasoning skills?
A few days ago, Father G. Odifreddi concluded his article on the Republic concerning the abilities of women in mathematics with these words: “A descending progression, which seems to indicate how the feminine attitude is directly proportional to concreteness and indirectly proportional to abstraction”.
The statement is justified with reference to the percentage of women’s Nobel prizes in continuous decline (the now famous tabellum). I quote verbatim: “But women scientists are anyway less than you might expect, for example, this year no woman has won a Nobel prize, and until last year they won 16 in peace, 15 in literature, 12 In medicine, 4 in chemistry, 2 in physics and 1 in economics, 2 women have won the Turing prize for computer science, 1 the Fields medal in mathematics and none has ever been world champion in chess “.
To further support there is a plausible explanation of the most famous living scientist: James Watson. According to Watson, the average IQ of women is higher than that of men, but women have less variance than men. That is, women are on average more intelligent than men, but have fewer points: in the geniality, on the one hand, and in autism and schizophrenia, on the other. An unproven theory (otherwise the problem would not arise) but not for this to be excluded.
At this point, you can imagine how all the existing “politically correct” movements have hurled themselves against a similar (in their way of seeing) sexist and macho sexist. Ravings? No. Sexist? Well this yes. For the machismo I do not see the conditions. But let’s come to us.
Are there scientific studies that show that the brains of men and women are different and that women are less abstraction than men?
The answer is yes, but they have not been considered correct by the scientific community.
There are researches considered more reliable as for example a research of the University of Turin published in the journal Public Library of Sciences in which it is said that the gap between the two sexes is considerable. “The idea that there are only small differences in personality between men and women must be rethought because it is based on inadequate methods”.
The research was carried out on a sample of 10,000 subjects with 15 different personality traits. The major discrepancy concerns sensitivity, traditional female domination. Women also record very high values in terms of warmth and apprehension, while men stand out for their emotional balance, conscientiousness and tendency towards dominance. Perfectionism, vitality and tendency towards abstraction instead see the almost total equality between the sexes. The males are more stable emotionally, more dominant, more bound to the rules and less confident, while the females are warmer emotionally, less confident and more sensitive.
Finally, there are studies that even say the opposite: the brain of man and woman are practically identical to less than socio-cultural conditions (scientific results politically correct).
One understands then how at the scientific level there are not very clear ideas about the differences, or not, between man and woman. Maybe in a few years the secret will be revealed also scientifically, for now anyway, we just have to stay clinging to the statistics or trusting our scientific good sense.
The thesis of Odifreddi
Women are on average more intelligent than men, but have fewer points: in the geniality, on the one hand, and in autism and schizophrenia, on the other.
It derives from it in mathematics:
On average, women are maths with greater human abilities, but it is more unlikely that a mathematical genius can “be born” from the female brain.
From which
The capacity for maximum abstraction in mathematics can only be reached by a genius, therefore statistically the man reaches more peaks of the woman in abstraction capacity.
The genius is a singularity and can be considered as an abnormal functioning of the brain a bit like a CPU of a computer that is pushed at a speed to the limits of its ability to function. An anomalous functioning such as genius is often accompanied by certain psychiatric illnesses and it is known that diseases can statistically attack more sex than the other.
Returning to the article, the Working Group of Equal Opportunities of the Italian Mathematical Union promptly responded with a decidedly menacing tone, in which, however, only a lack of understanding of Odifreddi’s thesis is demonstrated.
Numerous other articles have sprung up like mushrooms on the web, some even very beautiful. The most were published by the mathematical women who felt called into question and who in some cases proposed their own life experience as a counter-test of the “Odifreddi thesis”. These are common mathematical women, like all of us on the other hand, who have dedicated their lives to mathematics, also achieving very respectable results, as can happen to all ordinary people of the rest. Odifreddi has called into question the genius, the madman, the bipolar, not ordinary people.
Knowing that many women (and many men) would have misrepresented this thesis has decided to put this little article in black and white to test the laws of stupidity. The last gem of Odifreddi is inserted in the opening to the answer: “Cari Ciro et al.”. A clear grip on the backs of those who had offended him with machismo distorting the meaning of his thesis. That said, I continue to glimpse a thin ironic line between P.G. Odifreddi, mathematics and women (some women).