| The following is an excerpt from an interview with Betsey, featured in the Shimer College Symposium:
You’ve been a student most of your life, all your life.
That’s true, but I would say that my Shimer experience is what really made me a student, because it opened up my world to all that there is to know. Before Shimer, I didn’t realize how much there was to know.
You were an early entrant, after 11th grade?
Yes. My father read the Sunday New York Times--he got it by mail every week in the middle of Ohio from New York--and he saw this article about Shimer College and other colleges which accepted Early Entrants, something we’d never heard of in the middle of Ohio at that time. This was July, and the article indicated that a small school in Illinois, Shimer College, still had some openings and was looking for Early Entrants. My father jumped at the chance to send me to college a year early.
You ended up doing a lot of math. Did you study math from early on?
Yes, I guess I decided in 8th grade, and it was because I liked my 8th grade math teacher so much that I wanted to teach math in high school. So, I knew, even at the time that I went to Shimer that I wanted to be a high school math teacher. And so that’s what I set as a goal. That was before I even realized how large an area mathematics was! It was just that I had this narrow goal of being a high school math teacher.
When did math get really difficult for you?
It really got difficult in graduate school at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, my first year out of Shimer. Because a lot was expected in practical applications of math, which I had had none of--absolutely none--and, you know, applying it to physics. I mean, you would think that maybe I would have seen it, at least briefly in Nat Sci 3 or something. I don’t think we really did, though. Anyway, it was very challenging.
When I was working on my master’s in math at the University of Florida in Gainesville in the mid ’60s, some of that was much easier. The time I really struggled was the year after Shimer. And then, some of the courses that I was taking in math and statistics when I was working on my Ph.D. were challenging. I mean, math is not something that just came very easily to me. I really had to work at it.
I understand you went to Africa.
Yes. In 1993, I was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to teach at the University of Malawi for a year. And I went there, and they needed me to stay longer and I wanted to stay longer, so we negotiated with Framingham State to make it a one-and-a-half year leave. But that was a wonderful experience too, working with the Malawian students. It reminded me very much of Florida A&M. My classes, though, in Malawi were huge calculus classes of eighty-eight and eighty-five students, and they expected me to correct homework at least once a week; and I had a statistics class of 103 students.
And now you’re continuing to travel.
Right. And part of our travel is volunteer work in Malawi. We’ve been back several times, and last summer we were back for three months. We volunteered at an orphan care center; because the AIDS problem is so huge in all of Southern Africa, and Malawi is one of the countries where it might be as high as thirty percent of the population that is infected with HIV, so it’ll probably become AIDS. There are thousands and thousands of orphans, and there’s a care center in central Malawi where we were volunteering. We were working with many of the primary school children who went to school in the region, and we tutored them after school. We also worked with some of their teachers on Saturdays. This particular orphan care project keeps the babies and the children in their own villages, and gets volunteers in the village to help care for them. And then it helps to provide the medical assistance and blankets and things through lots of donations and contributions, particularly from former Peace Corps volunteers who were in Malawi in the ’60s and ’70s and still have a very strong attachment. Then, lots of people just happen on it, as we did when we were in Malawi in ’99. So that’s one of the ways that we’re traveling. The other way that we’re traveling is through Framingham State’s overseas master’s program for teachers in American schools abroad that are generally in big cities.
Tell me a little bit about your research project, your biography of a woman mathematician?
I became interested in early American women mathematicians because there hasn’t been much said about them until recently. In the ’80s, I had a sabbatical and did some research at the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe. Over the years I focused in on one particular woman, Mary Frances Winston. In 1893, she was the first woman admitted to a graduate program at Göttingen in Germany; and she was the first American woman to receive a Ph.D. in Mathematics from a foreign university. She was in Göttingen for three years, from 1893 to 1896, and had a wonderful experience with Felix Klein as her mentor. She had met him in 1893 in Chicago at the World’s Columbian Exposition . So I’ve been working on a biography about her for several years.
She was really a trailblazer, and wrote detailed letters home much of the time--all the time that she was abroad--and I have copies of those letters, which her daughter gave me. Her daughter lived to be ninety-seven years old, and died in 1998. I visited her several times. Now I’m working with her son, Mary Frances’s grandson, who has just unearthed more letters from Mary Frances’s family’s earlier days. . .
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