When you face an incident or an obstacle, it is often difficult to know what the reason is, whether it is because you are a woman, you are from Costa Rica, or they just don’t like you. You often get the feeling that you don’t belong.”— Xenia de la Ossa, theoretical physicist

I am sitting in a quiet room on the second floor of a gallery, the walls lined with portraits of women mathematicians and theoretical physicists. The exhibition catalogue, which contains 177 pages of their stories and images, is open in my hands; I cannot put it down. For a while, I am the only viewer in the room. I read on in silence. A brisk jingling sound makes me look up. A young child has wandered in, flowers in her hair and silver anklets on her feet. Her parents follow her in. As the child skips along cheerfully, they look curiously at the pictures and whisper to each other. They must have many hopes for their daughter. This exhibition will remind them that like the women represented here, she can also study mathematics, science, art, or really anything that ignites her curiosity.

“Women of Mathematics” is more than just a photographic exhibition about mathematicians and theoretical physicists from around the world; it is also about who is permitted to be seen as a mathematician and whose stories are put up on walls. Pairing portraits with personal narratives, it becomes a deliberate act of visibility. The women’s voices speak for themselves.

“Nowadays, women still find it difficult to embrace a career in the mathematical academic world; social pressure and personal doubts may restrain them from doing so. As a result, one observes an embarrassing disparity between the proportion of men and women among professional mathematicians.”—Sylvie Paycha, mathematician and exhibition curator

Thus even as the main exhibition on humanity’s relationship with food occupies the primary gallery at Science Gallery Bengaluru, this smaller show, housed in a single room, brings mathematics out of abstraction and into the human narrative. It gives women working in this abstract discipline a room of their own, a wall for their faces and stories, and a sense that they belong in academic spaces.

In thoughtful and honest reflections, the women speak of structural barriers, social norms, caregiving responsibilities, and subtle exclusions. Sometimes institutional culture forced them into difficult choices. Women had to travel a long distance, often physically but also socially and intellectually, to arrive in the mathematics department. They also speak of mentorship and informal support networks. Mathematics is not produced in isolation but in the midst of families, choices, institutions, and culture. It takes a village to produce a mathematician; it also takes a world of travel, conferences, and developing ideas together.

“My mother had a PhD in botany from Bombay University but had [to] quit her job as a professor to take care of her two children, my younger sister and myself. The childcare centres did not exist back then, so she could not expect help. As a result, she left an academic career.”—Neela Nataraj

Visibility matters. Only 5 women have been recognised with the Nobel Prize in Physics; 8 in Chemistry; 14 in Physiology or Medicine. Of the more than 350 prizes awarded in these fields, only 27 have been given to women; only 2 women have been recognised with the Fields Medal (considered the most important prize in the field of mathematics) in its history. In India, this global narrative of women in mathematics is placed in a local context where issues of equity, access, and representation continue to matter profoundly. Absences are found in prize committees, leadership positions, conference line-ups. Against this background, a room where only women mathematicians are on the walls becomes more than ornament; it becomes a correction to an overwhelmingly male visual landscape.

“At the time, people perhaps didn’t believe that women could do mathematics, but now they see me, and they say, ‘If she can do it, you can do it.’ I’m now a role model for them, because I’ve shown them that it’s possible.”—Cornelie Mitcha Malanda

Conceived and curated by the French mathematician Sylvie Paycha with the American/German photographer Noel Tovia Matoff, the exhibition highlights how lived experiences shape the practice of mathematics for women across diverse cultural, institutional, and social contexts that shape participation in the field.

“The provincial society I grew up in was severely male-dominated and brutal in some aspects.”—Sofia Lambropoulou

Launched in 2016

First launched at the 7th European Congress of Mathematics at the Technische Universität Berlin in 2016, the exhibition has since been shown at over 170 venues worldwide, including universities, research institutes, schools, and cultural centres.

One of its primary aims is to encourage young women to pursue careers in mathematics and theoretical physics, the fields in which women remain under-represented globally.

“I have to admit that I was about to give up doing mathematics when, as a mother of young children, I was trying to finish my thesis, which finally took me eight years to write up.”—Margarida Mendes Lopes

The mission of Science Gallery Bengaluru, a not-for-profit public institution, is to bring science back into culture. In Bengaluru, a city with a strong research ecosystem, it works with three academic partners: the Indian Institute of Science, the National Centre for Biological Sciences, and the Srishti Institute of Art, Design, and Technology. This exhibition is being hosted in partnership with the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences, the Raman Research Institute, and the Consulate General of the Federal Republic of Germany.

“When I was an undergraduate at Cambridge, I was annoyed that the mathematics department insisted on addressing me as ‘Mr’ F. Kirwan in all official correspondence.”—Frances Kirwan

Jahnavi Phalkey, founding director at Science Gallery Bengaluru, said: “We trust this will encourage young men to recognise women mathematicians as part of the intellectual landscape and for young women to fearlessly think of mathematics as their own, just as the women portrayed in the exhibition have been able to.”

“I lived in a very rural town. It was very common for people to think that men were better than women, just better as human beings. There’s even a special word in Japanese for the way people looked down on women in that era.”—Shihoko Ishii

Matoff took pictures of the women on a 120 roll film with her medium format camera, a twin lens Rolleiflex, in addition to using her digital equipment. She trained as a photographer, first with Abisag Tüllmann and then at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg. For over three decades, portraits have been at the centre of her work. Among these are the photographs she has taken of the life and work of midwives and of people living with Alzheimer’s.

“The female member of the hiring commission dissuaded me from choosing to work part time if I wanted to do serious research.”—Karin Baur.

None of the women say that they have ever regretted choosing mathematics as a profession. Yet for some of them, there has been a cost. Some express that music might have been another career choice. Some reflect that perhaps doing medicine would have given their work more direct human impact.

“In my class I was the only girl to go to high school. It was a rather conservative environment and my teacher thought girls did not need to get further education.”—Karin Baur

The struggle, the choices

They reflect on the struggle that has been part of their journey. They speak about the choices they have had to make, sometimes forging their own path because there was no one to advise them. On seeking and finding opportunities to study mathematics in greater depth. On the beauty and delight of proofs and concepts. On “feeling watched” when they were one of very few women students, or the only woman student, in the mathematics department. On marrying when they found the right partner, who would share responsibilities of child-rearing and caregiving.

On taking their children along to conferences; sometimes giving up on longer travel when their children were older so that they would not miss school. On stepping away from a good position to care for a family member who was seriously ill. On organising a regular women’s lunch not necessarily to talk about mathematics but just as an informal support network to connect and share information and experiences. On finding their way. On the joy of mathematics. On the conviction that they would tell any young woman to do the same and follow their interest.

“Sharing with my male colleagues the questions that come to my mind, such as the difficulty to come back to mathematics after a maternity leave, is difficult, if not impossible. After a child’s birth, men intend to go on working as before, when women are ready to reorganise their schedule and to dedicate less time to research. Having received prizes, at the time my children were born, it was expected that I would get back to research straight away. However, during my maternity leave, topics on which I was working were the object of research and led to publications I was not invited to join.”—Nalini Anantharaman

In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf describes being ordered off a college lawn, the grass reserved for Fellows and Scholars, the gravel path “the place for me”. In a single image, the incident points to centuries of exclusion of women from academic spaces.

Visiting Somerville College, one of Oxford’s first women’s colleges, I thought of that scene as I stood before the portrait of the brilliant Scottish scientist Mary Somerville, who taught herself mathematics despite family opposition and later lent her name to an early petition for women’s suffrage. The path Woolf was barred from walking on now leads, in small and imperfect ways, into rooms like this gallery, where women scientists’ faces and stories are finally on the walls.

“Another feature of mathematics I like very much is that it is common to the whole world, and insensitive to politics. It is a universal language.”—Stefka Bouyuklieva

I watch the little girl walking around the room, looking up at the faces of the women in the portraits. Her steps are slow and thoughtful now. Fifteen years from now, when she is choosing what to study in university, she will have an indistinct memory of this space and of a room lined with portraits of women who have made a life in mathematics. Perhaps the world will not need an exhibition like this by then.

“Maths was a means of liberation for me.”—Saloua Aouadi

Coded as masculine

Perceived as an abstract discipline, mathematics has historically been coded as masculine. Exhibitions such as these act as a corrective in fields that otherwise erase the contributions of women. Representation works through suggestion, normalising the idea of women as scientists, as mathematicians, as people who have full lives and who solve interesting questions, as people whose portraits deserve to be on walls. 

Uma Mahadevan Dasgupta is in the IAS.

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