A recent op-ed in the Journal (I am embarassed to say I read them sometimes. In the age of Trump some of them are almost moderate) Gerald Baker compares some things the left does today to Nazi Germany. It's not his most convincing argument. He links to this article in Scientific American about racism in the math profession, which he erroneously conflates into the statement that left says math is racist. The rest of his article is less stupid.
The article he links do does draw attention to some worthwhile instances of people trying to raise the representation of people of color and LGBTQ people in math, which sounds good to me. I'm sure there's some institutional overreach too.
But it got me to thinking about the older math nerds who are creating the bad conditions in the first place. First off, I'll bet a bunch of them are autistic and therefore don't have a good understanding of how others perceive their behavior. And I will tell you for certain that a lot of them were picked on brutally when they were younger and have a big fucking chip on their shoulder. They have carved out their little corner of the universe and will protect it at all cost from anybody, or at least anybody they didn't know from grad school. They weren't good at football or basketball and didn't have a bunch of friends in high school but they had math, and the ones who made it to tenure at the university have fought hard for that tenure.
Now, most of the math people I knew and the ones I grew up with aren't like that exactly. Most of them are pretty chill and enlightened people. But every so often I will see an edge to one of them, a certain "don't fuck with me I know what I'm worth." And the very most accomplished math people never expanded their social circles enough to meet someone like me. I'm sure there are some rough psyches in there, people still fighting the battles of their childhood and, to the best of their knowledge, winning consistently.
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