Dispatches from the Home Front: Girls just wanna do math -- and have fun

By Barbara Wood

Special to the Almanac

I have something to say to Harvard University President Lawrence Summers, who recently suggested women may just not have the genetic ability to do science and math well: My daughters have it in their genes.

Now, I'll readily admit those genes didn't come from mom, who, like most newspaper reporters, has a hard time figuring out stuff like percentages, especially late on election night on deadline, and has been known to write a story about someone living in a 10,000-square-foot apartment without that pesky extra zero catching her eye.

My husband, however, the one with the Ph.D. in computer science, did notice the mistake after it was printed in the newspaper. It's him my two daughters got their math ability from, and sometimes I think even he is impressed by their prowess with numbers.

Our eldest, while still in primary school, used to amuse herself during long car trips by adding three digit numbers in her head. I'm pretty sure she's never taken a math class she didn't ace, and on the college entrance exam she missed only one question on the math portion of the test.

Of course she did react in an extremely female way to this accomplishment -- she used it to cajole her parents into allowing her to have her nose pierced. (The tiny emerald looks quite stunning, if I must say so myself.)

What she doesn't seem to have in her genes is a desire to use this math talent of hers. Instead of becoming an engineer, she's studying art, majoring in graphic design. She has expressed interest in adding a minor in business, though, because she thinks she'd like to run a magazine some day.

It is all a bit ironic. Because she excels at math, she probably could have attended a more prestigious college as an engineering major than as the art major she is.

My youngest daughter is also a whiz at math, perhaps even better than her sister. Tonight she'll receive a first-place medal at the school science fair for her project about an obscure law governing the frequency with which numbers appear as the first digit in larger numbers.

Last year, a card-playing computer program she wrote won first place in the Bay Area science fair and went to the state science fair. She was also top student in her pre-algebra class last year and is top student in algebra so far this year.

My daughters and my husband have been known to discuss interesting math problems at the dinner table, although my son and I tune out pretty quickly.

My son, alas, does not have math genes. It took him two tries to get better than a D in Algebra II, although he did bring it up to a B- in summer school.

That hasn't stopped him from wanting to follow in his dad's footsteps, though; he plans to major in computer science when the starts college next year.

I don't know what my younger daughter's career goal is at the moment, but I'm pretty sure it's not to teach math at Harvard.
Barbara Wood lives in Woodside in an old house filled with redheads and animals. Her column runs the third week of the month.

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