In the same way Pablo Casals has credited humanity with one of Bach’s most divine works, ChatGPT has helped me re-discover Grete Hermann.
There was very little on her back then and perhaps still now on Wikipedia. I remember coming across her name in one of the Google’s Headquarter talks that span a range of STEM topics that was uploaded to Youtube in around 2016-2017. The topic was Quantum Physics/Mechanics. The video was removed or made undiscoverable just a few years later and she has been lost to me ever since. Googling her context and her keywords turned up nothing due to all odds against it for the recommendation engine (“female physicist”, “female mathematician”, “1950s”, “quantum mechanics”, “Bell’s inequality”). This proved frustrating at the time as I was compiling my own list of names including the likes of Jocelyn Bell and Elena Cornaro which has since then been lost to me as well as I was playing too fast and loose with all the digital tools and printouts and papers. I should have gotten myself a proper notebook.
My partner told me recently that he had been reading biographies of women whose greatest crimes were their brilliance and thus were subsequently erased from history. It is such a sad and painful topic — wrathful of course at the time I was younger and unbelievable in its extent of monstrosity. I told him simply that I knew about them. I might have been one of the first on that wagon since I was an early Reddit user. I remember coming across Emmy Noether (in association with Neumann) probably in the early 2010s before the internet discovered her, as well as Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper. I believe, in fact, that Lovelace and Hopper, the former having an entire programming language named after her, are obligated mentions in computer science textbooks and basic course materials. My professors acknowledged and taught them in my classes, but again, they were brilliant men and brilliant men almost always had remarkable mothers. So they were mostly defending their mothers — or being exceptionally intelligent themselves they appreciate that quality in others regardless of conventional biases. But I like the former explanation better.
I started noticing this trend when without exception the mothers of all my boyfriends turned up remarkable whereas the fathers were barely distinguished which seemed counter intuitive to me at the time. Two of them did not have a formal education at all being Western and from a much older generation. The other was one of the most remarkable Thai women I’ve met and her son was a prodigy. At my university, our advanced math class — I believe it was Calculus II — was taught by an aging woman of small and fragile frame who walked with a stoop and spoke very little. She was probably born in the 1950s but had a math PhD and taught classes in English. We later learned that she was the mother of one of our professors in the department. Our star professor in fact — a double-major computer science and math graduate from Carnegie Mellon with a perfect 4.0 GPA — in a small star-studded department full of former math and physics Olympiads who had to leave their posts working at Google and IBM as per their full ride governmental scholarship contracts.
The other was a physics PhD from Caltech who, if I remember correctly, was speculated to have made a massive fortune from writing his own stock trading algorithm in the 2000s and had only been teaching university classes out of boredom and occasionally took on irrelevant coursework like machine learning and IoT probably because he got fed up teaching projectile motions for the umpteenth time. I walked into the computer science lab once in my third or fourth year and he stocked the table full of electronic components. He wanted the computer science kids to build an electronic circuitry from scratch. Another professor taking on a first year programming class had us program LEGO robots for a sumo fight. We named our prize fighter robot “Beastie” and spent many hours designing and perfecting and programming him. I believe our team won in the championship bracket, but with everyone having so much fun and cheering and enthusiastically having re-matches it stopped mattering.
I forgot what my point was in all this. Ah, the intelligent men. Well ironically enough, the professors who sparked my interest in the history of physics were two humanities professors. It was first the philosophy professor (a European intellectual and a classical pianist who once called Marx and Kant boring and recommended me Husserl instead) from my first-semester in college who explained quantum entanglement to me after class and this probably culminated in me doing a silly two hour presentation on Quantum Gravity for my astronomy class in my third year (I wrote a blog post on this topic which I may revive). The second was a sociology professor who used to teach at the University of Chicago — a home to the great George Herbert Mead, John Dewey, and Martha Nussbaum — most likely in the 80s and defected to Thailand after his disillusionment with the academic establishment. He devoted his first lecture of his Social Science 101 course to the history of quantum revolution in the early 1900s and its key figures. He later lent me his personal copy of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.
After having paid my dues to all the great and bright men in my life, I will say two things on this topic. First, the truly intelligent, high IQ people in my personal experience regardless of gender are more emotionally intelligent than the seemingly emotionally intelligent people with low and average IQs. Much worst than them are the 50th to the 94th percentile. They are adequately smart to merit some form of recognition and success in life, but undoubtedly insecure and low-minded enough to make the lives of others better than them miserable. The 95th percentilers, on the other hand, are magnificent people and it is within this range that their IQs and EQs scale up in direct correlation. Below this, it is inverse correlation all the way through. This fact may have eluded people who mistake emotional expressivity with emotional intelligence.
Here is a good portrait of the 50-ers to 94-ers by one 95th percentiler:
A man thinks that he is more intelligent than his wife because he can add up a column of figures more accurately, and because he understands the imbecile jargon of the stock market, and because he is able to distinguish between the ideas of rival politicians, and because he is privy to the minutiae of some sordid and degrading business or profession, say soap-selling or the law. But these empty talents, of course, are not really signs of a profound intelligence; they are, in fact, merely superficial accomplishments, and their acquirement puts little more strain on the mental powers than a chimpanzee suffers in learning how to catch a penny or scratch a match. The whole bag of tricks of the average business man, or even of the average professional man, is inordinately childish. It takes no more actual sagacity to carry on the everyday hawking and haggling of the world, or to ladle out its normal doses of bad medicine and worse law, than it takes to operate a taxicab or fry a pan of fish. No observant person, indeed, can come into close contact with the general run of business and professional men—I confine myself to those who seem to get on in the world, and exclude the admitted failures—without marvelling at their intellectual lethargy, their incurable ingenuousness, their appalling lack of ordinary sense.
H.L. Mencken
A second thing I would like to say. I know there are articles and op-eds being hawked off about sexism in the tech sector, but I believe people in the traditional academic institutions have heard of Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper. But what about in literature, music, journalism, broadcasting, entertainment, finance, business, academics and government? In my personal observation the tech circles are extremely culturally and socially progressive, being intolerant of inefficiency and authority in general, as opposed to medicine or law or engineering. The best of them are cross-grained and recalcitrant at heart despite having diverse temperaments (hence the proliferation of programming languages and endless new implementations of libraries and frameworks). You could almost call a lot of them libertarians (hence the “flat hierarchy” buzzword in job listings). There is a high rate of 95th percentilers in the field, coupled with the fact that you can’t bullshit in this job as with other traditionally “smart people” fields.
Additionally, tech shouldn’t be lumped with other STEM fields. In fact, it could be placed at a diametrically opposed pole to research and academia. There reigned an insidious pecking order and myth-making and one hit wonders who think they are more intelligent than they actually are. Tech superstars can’t steal other people’s work and appropriate them as their own as there is a lot of novelties and domain-specific considerations to each given issue at any given time (from framework and language to the feature of a software to a specific behaviour on a page to the platform that runs them to the libraries that power them to the module that compiles and deploys them — think Docker and Babel and TypeScript support). It has become minute engineering on the grandest scale. Your ability to tackle these issues from day to day or even from hour to hour determines your progress in this field. It embodies the most extreme form of what in psychology is called “fluid intelligence,” as opposed to “crystallised intelligence.” Highly crystallised intelligence people can dominate other fields. In fact, they tend to rise to the top, passing off their intelligence as “fluid” when they simply look good on paper or are perhaps a little more articulate and diligent and a little more socially dominant than most of their peers. Hence, the gate-keeping and the politicking. Hence, they can do real harm to women.
Before I blast off the list which is the point of this post, I’d like to publicly state that I hate International Women’s Day. It has now been appropriated by corporations to appear hip and to increase esprit de corps. Its underpinning philosophy is that it’s supposed to be a feel good day because women have come far and they are now achieving recognitions. But the stock of women has been the same since the dawn of history, as well as their contributions and participations in the social, economic and intellectual spheres. Are we celebrating the fact that we now recognise women’s achievements when we have previously dismissed and disregarded them for over a millennium before? Are we simply celebrating as a way to appease half of the professional workforce which is now made up of women? Are we simply that ignorant of history and its treatment of women that we should be feeling inspired on this day rather than outraged or sad? If you actually care about the achievement of womenkind, publicise and educate the public on each and every single woman on this list (I shall call it my “Grete Hermann list” which I will get to) because their achievements are remarkable and they have actually contributed something to the world rather than being endowed a randomly assigned attribute at birth which is no predetermination of anything worth celebrating.
What struck me personally during that time of early intellectual growth, as far as I can recall, were in this order:
1. The Susan Sontag question. Her story has puzzled me for years. You could call her a success. I consider her a failure, as she was obviously destined to be a thinker of a much higher order and yet all she could achieve in life was being some dazzling American essayist. I have come to the conclusion in the past couple of years that her intellectual development was arrested by the birth of her son and that dismal marriage. Her husband, her college professor at the time, was much less intelligent than she was which would not be an issue if he wasn’t also malevolent and passed off her work on Freud as his own. “His” book on Freud achieved him a career breakthrough. He profited directly off her gift and talent and he legally gagged her up using their later divorce proceedings.
2. Zelda Fitzgerald’s diaries. The so-called “brilliant” writer stole his work from a woman, yet again.
3. Mozart’s sister, of course. Who hasn’t heard of her extraordinary talents. The great musical genius was overshadowed by his own sister.
4. There were some recordings of Fanny Mendelssohn that made its way onto Youtube around 2020. I remember being quite taken by them. I think her musical sensibility and raw innate talent much surpasses her brother.
5. Derrida praising and taken in by Hélène Cixous. I quoted Hélène Cixous in one of my college essays.
6. For everyone else, it was Frida Kahlo. For me, the little known Camille Claudel. It was obvious she was more gifted than Rodin, so he ruined her.
7. Of course everyone knew about Jocelyn Bell and Rosalind Franklin these days, but I raise you Grete Hermann. Nobody has truly re-discovered her yet. I have yet to see her bandied about in internet discourses about forgotten women.
8. I’ve come around to the theory that Shakespeare was probably a woman. That’s perhaps why there are no compelling candidates given the whole field of study around it, whether historical or literary. It was obviously not Francis Bacon. The fact that they reached for him was laughable to begin with. They fumbled badly because they didn’t know where to look.
It was only in 1986 that all Oxford colleges finally lifted its last ban to refuse entry to women. Nineteen eighty six. The Polgár sisters and Hou Yifan were way ahead of their times of course and that made their achievements even more marvelous. Anna Cramling often features her GM mother in her channel. A lot of brilliant women in chess despite drawing from a much smaller stock, probably at least twenty times smaller. Do the math.
Lastly, having bored and put everyone off by this point, I will cite the Monty Hall problem. We learned about it in one of our computer science classes and any relatively smart person would have heard of it. What I didn’t know was that the Monty Hall problem was solved by a woman: Marilyn vos Savant. I had to come across this little factoid on Reddit a few months ago. She was listed as the world’s highest IQ by the Guinness World Records.
There are scientific studies done in the area of genetic inheritance of intelligence and I often heard more than its contrary claims, although perhaps more eye-popping if not actually true, that we inherit our IQs more from our mother’s side than our father’s. The first I heard about it was probably 15 years ago. The last I heard about it, being a recent study, was a few months ago. But the lack of scientific consensus aside, I will quote this:
Even the old and popular expression “mother-wit” shows the early recognition of this second truth, which depends upon the experience both with regard to small and great intellectual endowments, that they are the possession of those whose mothers proportionately distinguished themselves by their intelligence. That, on the other hand, the intellectual qualities of the father are not transmitted to the son is proved both by the fathers and the sons of men distinguished by the most eminent faculties, for, as a rule, they are quite ordinary men, without a trace of the paternal mental gifts. But if now an isolated exception to this experience, so often confirmed, should appear; such, for example, as is presented by Pitt and his father, Lord Chatham, we are warranted in ascribing it to accident, nay, obliged to do so, although, on account of the exceptional rarity of great talents, it is certainly an accident of a most extraordinary kind. Here, however, the rule holds good: it is improbable that the improbable never happens. Besides, great statesmen (as was already mentioned in chapter 22) are so just as much through the qualities of their character, thus through what is inherited from the father, as through the superiority of their mind. On the other hand, among artists, poets, and philosophers, to whose works alone genius is properly ascribed, I know of no case analogous to that. Raphael’s father was certainly a painter, but not a great one; Mozart’s father, and also his son, were musicians, but not great ones. However, it is indeed wonderful that the fate which had destined a very short life to both of these men, each the greatest in his own sphere, as it were by way of compensation, took care, by letting them be born already in their workshop, that, without suffering the loss of time in youth which for the most part occurs in the case of other men of genius, they received even from childhood, through paternal example and instruction, the necessary introduction into the art to which they were exclusively destined. This secret and mysterious power which seems to guide the individual life I have made the subject of special investigations, which I have communicated in the essay, “Ueber die scheinbare Absichtlichkeit im Schicksale des Einzelnen” (Parerga, vol. i.). It is further to be observed here that there are certain scientific occupations which certainly presuppose good native faculties, yet not those which are really rare and extraordinary; while the principal requirements are zealous efforts, diligence, patience, early instruction, sustained study, and much practice. From this, and not from the inheritance of the intellect of the father, the fact is to be explained that, since the son always willingly follows the path that has been opened up by the father, and almost all businesses are hereditary in certain families, in some sciences also, which before everything demand diligence and persistence, individual families can show a succession of men of merit; such are the Scaligers, the Bernouillis, the Cassinis, the Herschels.
The number of proofs of the actual inheritance of the intellect of the mother would be much greater than it appears if it were not that the character and disposition of the female sex is such that women rarely give public proof of their mental faculties; and therefore these do not become historical, and thus known to posterity. Besides, on account of the weaker nature in general of the female sex, these faculties themselves can never reach the grade in them to which they may afterwards rise in the son; thus, with reference to themselves, we have to estimate their achievements higher in this proportion. Accordingly, in the first instance, only the following examples present themselves as proofs of our truth. Joseph II. was the son of Maria Theresia. Cardanus says in the third chapter, “De vita propria:” “Mater mea fuit memoria et ingenio pollens.” J. J. Rousseau says in the first book of the “Confessions:” “La beauté de ma mère, son [pg 326]esprit, ses talents,—elle en avait de trop brillans pour son état,” &c., and then quotes some delightful lines of hers. D’Alembert was the illegitimate son of Claudine de Tencin, a woman of superior mind, and the author of several romances and similar works, which met with great approbation in her day, and should even still be enjoyable (see her biography in the “Blätter für litterarische Unterhaltung,” March 1845, Nos. 71-73). That Buffon’s mother was a remarkable woman is shown by the following passage from the “Voyage à Montbar, par Hérault de Sechelles,” which Flourens quotes in his “Histoire des travaux de Buffon,” p. 288: “Buffon avait ce principe qu’en général les enfants tenaient de leur mère leurs qualités intellectuelles et morales: et lorsqu’il l’avait développé dans la conversation, il en faisait sur-le-champ l’application à lui-même, en faisant un éloge pompeux de sa mère, qui avait en effet, beaucoup d’esprit, des connaissances étandues, et une tête très bien organisée.” That he includes the moral qualities is an error which is either committed by the reporter, or depends upon the fact that his mother had accidentally the same character as himself and his father… Hume says in his short autobiography: “Our mother was a woman of singular merit.” It is said of Kant’s mother in the most recent biography by F. W. Schubert: “According to the judgment of her son himself, she was a woman of great natural understanding. For that time, when there was so little opportunity for the education of girls, she was exceptionally well instructed, and she also continued later to care for her further education by herself. In the course of walks she drew the attention of her son to all kinds of natural phenomena, and tried to explain to him through them the power of God.” What a remarkably able, clever, and superior woman Goethe’s mother was is now universally known. How much she has been spoken of in literature! while his father has not been spoken of at all; Goethe himself describes him as a man of subordinate faculties. Schiller’s mother was susceptible to poetry, and made verses herself, a fragment of which will be found in his biography by Schwab. Bürger, that genuine poetic genius, to whom perhaps the first place after Goethe among German poets belongs—for compared with his ballads those of Schiller seem cold and laboured—has given an account of his parents which for us is significant, and which his friend and physician, Althof repeats in his biography which appeared in 1798, in these words: “Bürger’s father was certainly provided with a variety of knowledge after the manner of study prevalent at the time, and was also a good, honourable man; but he loved his quiet comfort and his pipe of tobacco so much, that, as my friend used to say, he had always first to pull himself together if he was going to apply himself for a quarter of an hour or so to the instruction of his son. His wife was a woman of extraordinary mental endowments, which, however, were so little cultivated that she had scarcely learnt to write legibly. Bürger thought that with proper culture his mother would have been the most famous of her sex, although he several times expressed a strong disapproval of different traits of her moral character. However, he believed that he inherited from his mother some mental gifts, and from his father an agreement with his moral character.” Walter Scott’s mother was a poetess, and was in communication with the wits of her time, as we learn from the obituary notice of Walter Scott in the Globe of 24th September 1832. That poems of hers appeared in print in 1789 I find from an article entitled “Mother-wit,” in the Blätter für litterarische Unterhaltung of 4th October 1841, published by Brockhaus, which gives a long list of clever mothers of distinguished men, from which I shall only take two: “Bacon’s mother was a distinguished linguist, wrote and translated several works, and in all of them showed learning, acuteness, and taste. Boerhave’s mother distinguished herself through medical knowledge.” On the other hand, Haller has preserved for us a strong proof of the inheritance of the mental weakness of the mother, for he says: “E duabus patriciis sororibus, ob divitias maritos nactis, quum tamen fatuis essent proximæ, novimus in nobilissimas gentes nunc a seculo retro ejus morbi manasse semina, ut etiam in quarta generatione, quintave, omnium posterorum aliqui fatui supersint” (Elementa physiol., Lib. xxix. § 8). Also, according to Esquirol, madness is more frequently inherited from the mother than the father. If, however, it is inherited from the father, I attribute this to the disposition of the character whose influence occasions it.
…
If single cases should be found in which a highly gifted son had a mother who was not mentally distinguished at all, this may be explained from the fact that this mother herself had a phlegmatic father, and on this account her more than ordinarily developed brain was not adequately excited by a corresponding energy of the circulation—a necessary condition, as I have explained [pg 330]above in chapter 31. Nevertheless, her highly perfected nervous and cerebral system was transmitted to the son, in whose case a father with a lively and passionate disposition and an energetic action of the heart was added, and thus the other physical condition of great mental power first appeared here. Perhaps this was Byron’s case, since we nowhere find the mental advantages of his mother mentioned. The same explanation is also to be applied to the case in which the mother of a son of genius who was herself distinguished for mental gifts had a mother who was by no means clever, for the father of the latter has been a man of a phlegmatic disposition.
The inharmonious, disproportionate, ambiguous element in the character of most men might perhaps be referred to the fact that the individual has not a simple origin, but derives the will from the father and the intellect from the mother. The more heterogeneous and ill-adapted to each other the two parents were, the greater will that want of harmony, that inner variance, be. While some excel through their heart and others through their head, there are still others whose excellence lies in a certain harmony and unity of the whole nature, which arises from the fact that in them heart and head are so thoroughly adapted that they mutually support and advance each other; which leads us to assume that the parents were peculiarly suited to each other, and agreed in an exceptional measure.
Schopenhauer
Salisa lohavittayavikant 