Item: Retirement party for Joanne Elliott. One of my (male) colleagues reminisced about seeing Joanne as an attractive young woman in the common room at Princeton surrounded by young men eager to be near her. The comment made me very uncomfortable, since it placed emphasis on her attractiveness in a setting where conversations are often mathematical. If only the men had been clustered around her because they were eager to hear her theorems and conjectures! But at least as the story was related, that was not the case.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "Item: Retirement party for Joanne Elliott. One of my (male) colleagues reminisced about seeing Joanne as an attractive young woman in the common room at Princeton surrounded by young men eager to be near her. The comment made me very uncomfortable, since it placed emphasis on her attractiveness in a setting where conversations are often mathematical. If only the men had been clustered around her because they were eager to hear her theorems and conjectures! But at least as the story was related, that was not the case." in the context of "(September 1991), "In Her Own Words: Six Mathematicians Reflect on Their Lives and Careers", Notices of the American Mathematical Society;Special Issue on Women in Mathematics 36 no: 7, pages: 702–706 (quote from p. 706)" to mean that wisdom is timeless.