Occasional Address to the March 2004 reception for the Order of Australia
recipients in the New Years Honours List - March 17 2004
Cheryl E Praeger
Chairman, Awardees, Ladies and Gentlemen.
It
is a privilege and pleasure to address you this evening, and especially to be
one of the first to add my congratulations to the new Order of Australia
recipients.
Perhaps you are experiencing feelings of surprise and delight that your particular service within the community --- service in an area that you care about passionately, service that has given you deep personal satisfaction over many years --- has been acknowledged formally in this award. We celebrate with you, and we congratulate you.
As you heard, I am a Mathematician. In the invitation to give this address our Chairman David Wilcox suggested that I might mention my “fall into Mathematics”. I was the first child and only daughter in my family. I grew up in various country towns in South East Queensland, as my banker father was transferred every few years. Nobody in my family in Queensland had been to University, so an academic career, let alone in Mathematics, did not feature in my imagination of my future. A minor accident in the town swimming pool at age 11 resulted in a permanently bent little finger, and demolished my secret dreams of being a concert pianist. This ambition was temporarily replaced by a plan to become a stewardess on a grand ocean liner. Actually this was the only way I could imagine of traveling to see the world. But then, my father decided to leave the bank at age 40, move to the city (Brisbane), and become a chiropractor; all of this despite his employer’s dire prediction of a future of abject poverty for my family. From my father’s brave decision to change profession I learned that reaching out to achieve my dreams was acceptable. I learned from Dad also to value wisdom and understanding. Dad’s gift and passion was in natural healing; mine was in Mathematics.
I loved Mathematics at high school. I was simultaneously excited by being able to solve problems using Mathematics, and terrified of mathematics examinations. I didn’t know that there were any live mathematicians in the world, or what a mathematician’s life might be like. I had heard the names Pythagoras, Galileo, … even Nightingale, from my school science courses and general reading, but I didn’t really think of any of them, except perhaps Pythagoras, as a mathematician. I now know a little more about them.
Pythagoras, who lived around 500 BC, is one of my heroes. Best known for what we now call Pythagoras’s Theorem about right angled triangles, Pythagoras believed that all parts of the world were governed by mathematical principles, and he was the first person recorded to state clearly that Mathematics is the way to understand the universe.
Much later, in the 16th century, Galileo, who discovered that the earth rotates around the sun, held the view that the laws of Nature are written in the language of mathematics.
And then in the 19th century Florence Nightingale, best known for her reform of hospitals and the nursing profession, became a pioneer of mathematical methods in public health statistics. She was a highly respected member of the (Royal) Statistical Society in the UK, and indeed she was the first woman to be elected a member.
What attracted me to Mathematics was a mixture of things: the way Mathematics helped explain how things worked in the world; the excitement of solving previously unsolved problems; the sheer beauty of mathematical patterns and structure.
I studied Mathematics a long time before the modern Information Technology revolution. Indeed my children find it difficult to believe that I never had an electronic calculator before they were born. However, by the time I was in high school much of the preparation was in place for this I.T. revolution. I just did not know about it. For example, already in 1948, Claude Shannon, now called the Father of Information Theory, had established the mathematical basis for electronic communication. W. Edwards Deming’s statistical methods, that assisted the post-war recovery of the Japanese economy, had laid the foundations for the mathematical theory of quality management and quality control so fundamental for industry today. R. W. Hamming had completed much of his mathematical work on error-correcting codes that, perhaps unknowingly, we use every day for reliable use of our personal computers. Hamming saw that “almost all of science and engineering has used extensive mathematical manipulations with remarkable successes”.
I chose to study Mathematics without knowing anything about these incredible Mathematical breakthroughs, but I had seen in school the power of Mathematics in describing many natural phenomena. As a rather simple example, I remember being quite incredulous of my physics teacher’s claims that we could predict mathematically the exact position of our reflection in a mirror. I needed to see this with my own eyes in my first laboratory experiment before I was willing to believe it.
The transfer from a country high school to an all-girls school in Brisbane turned me into an “over-achiever” as I tried to prove to myself that my parents’ sacrifice in sending me to such a good school for my last three years of high school was not made in vain. However, even success at my new school was insufficient to give me the confidence to enter a Mathematics course at university. After all, no one else at school wanted to go on in Mathematics. The turning point was my winning first prize in a Mathematics competition run by the Queensland Association of Mathematics Teachers. We should not underestimate the value of such enrichment activities in all subjects for young people in providing much-needed confidence as well as excitement and challenge.
I completed a four-year honours degree in Mathematics at the University of Queensland. During the summer before my final year I won a Vacation Scholarship to the Australian National University in Canberra. I worked on an unsolved mathematics problem under the supervision of Professor B. H. Neumann, who became my life-long mentor and friend until his death at age 93 in 2002. The experience led both to my first research article in an international mathematics journal, and also to a burning desire to continue to do a doctorate. This I was able to do with the aid of a Commonwealth Scholarship to Oxford, completing my D. Phil. degree in 1973. By the way, I much preferred this means of visiting the UK over working as a stewardess on a boat. There followed a short-term position in the US, and several years on a post-doctoral fellowship in Canberra, during which time I met and married my husband John Henstridge.
John and I came to Perth on very short-term contracts in 1976. We stayed. Then in 1983, just two months and ten years after returning to Australia from Oxford, and just 17 months after our second son was born, I was appointed Professor of Mathematics at UWA. This was a life-transforming event. In particular, it required me to accept a very public position as a role model for women in Mathematics. The first woman to be Professor of Mathematics in Australia was Hanna Neumann, the first wife of my mentor Bernhard. Hanna was appointed professor almost 40 years ago, and died sadly of a cerebral haemorrhage a few years later. I was the second such appointment.
The position brought both responsibilities and opportunities. For example as member of the federal Curriculum Development Council in the 1980’s I had the opportunity to guide a large Australian Mathematics curriculum program. I was able to build a vibrant research team of graduate students and postdoctoral colleagues, and to establish a rich research and teaching environment that attracts students and mathematicians both from within Australia and internationally. We have active links with the major countries in the western world, as well as many countries in our region and the Middle East, notably China, Korea, Thailand, the Philippines, Singapore, Vietnam, Israel, Palestine, Iran. Opportunities arose as well to serve Australian Mathematics formally in roles such as President of the Australian Mathematical Society.
Mathematics has been in the vanguard of all important technological and social change. Because of this, our children, who are after all our future, need strong mathematical skills. This is essential for the future health and wealth of Australia. My vision is for our children to know that Mathematics is both beautiful and powerful, and moreover, to understand, if only in part, the “unreasonable effectiveness” of Mathematics in describing the world.
Nearly all of us here may, like me, be in the fortunate position of spending much of our time pursuing what for us is a vocation. It is exhausting. It is rewarding. For us personally and, we believe, for Australia, our endeavours are critically important. Our labours are not undertaken for recognition. Rather they are for us an unavoidable imperative. They are the “right thing” for us, something that we believe we must do. For the new awardees, this evening is the time that the rest of us acknowledge the importance of your contributions, and your commitment and success in them. Awardees: I salute you.
This speech was originally published in “The Order News”, Issue 2, 2004, pages 5-6, and is re-published with the permission of the Order of Australia Association, Western Australian Branch.