Related papers: Elitism in Mathematics and Inequality
Strikingly few Nobel laureates within medicine, natural and social sciences are women. Although it is obvious that there are fewer women researchers within these fields, does this gender ratio still fully account for the low number of…
We use the data of tenured and tenure-track faculty at ten public and private math departments of various tiered rankings in the United States, as a case study to demonstrate the statistical and mathematical relationships among several…
H\"{o}lder's inequality, since its appearance in 1888, has played a fundamental role in Mathematical Analysis and it is, without any doubt, one of the milestones in Mathematics. It may seem strange that, nowadays, it keeps resurfacing and…
Educator attention is critical for student success, yet how educators distribute their attention across students remains poorly understood due to data and methodological constraints. This study presents the first large-scale computational…
One of the unintended consequences of the New Public Management (NPM) in universities is often feared to be a division between elite institutions focused on research and large institutions with teaching missions. However, institutional…
In many competitive settings, from education to politics, rules do not reward effort evenly, and thresholds (e.g., grade cutoffs or electoral majorities) make some moments disproportionately important. Success thus depends on efficiently…
The Nobel Prize is awarded each year to individuals who have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind in Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Economics, Literature, and Peace, and is considered by many to be the most prestigious recognition for…
Peer review and citation metrics are two means of gauging the value of scientific research, but the lack of publicly available peer review data makes the comparison of these methods difficult. Mathematics can serve as a useful laboratory…
We present a scoping review of published literature on ethnomathematics and Indigenous mathematics as a step towards a goal to decolonize the prevailing Eurocentric view of the provenance of mathematics. Mathematical practices were…
Auto-evaluating language models (LMs), i.e., using a grader LM to evaluate the candidate LM, is an appealing way to accelerate the evaluation process and the cost associated with it. But this presents a paradox: how can we trust the grader…
Graduate school admission committees consider many factors for admission into a mathematics PhD program, and aspiring applicants often wonder which factors are more important. Applicants discerning where to best dedicate their time may ask…
In its December 2019 edition, the \textit{Notices of the American Mathematical Society} published an essay critical of the use of diversity statements in academic hiring. The publication of this essay prompted many responses, including…
The situation surrounding the Olympiads is paradoxical. On the one hand, considerable resources are spent on the Olympiads. On the other hand, there are widespread arguments about the harm of the Olympiads, often very strange ones. For…
We introduce a methodology to analyze citation metrics across fields of Mathematics. We use this methodology to collect and analyze the MathSciNet profiles of Full Professors of Mathematics at all 131 R1, research oriented US universities.…
The inequality of wealth distribution is a universal phenomenon in the civilized nations, and it is often imputed to the Matthew effect, that is, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Some philosophers unjustified this phenomenon and…
In many countries culture, practice or regulations inhibit the co-presence of relatives within the university faculty. We test the legitimacy of such attitudes and provisions, investigating the phenomenon of nepotism in Italy, a nation with…
In many countries and at European level, research policy increasingly focuses on 'excellent' researchers. The concept of excellence however is complex and multidimensional. For individual scholars it involves talents for innovative…
The field of the mathematical sciences relies on a continuous academic pipeline in which individuals progress from undergraduate study through graduate training and postdoctoral program to long term faculty employment. National statistics…
We study group fairness in the context of feedback loops induced by meritocratic selection into programs that themselves confer additional advantage, like college admissions. We introduce a stylized, yet novel inter-generational model for…
The demand for global university league tables has been high over the past two decades. However, significant criticism of their methodologies is accumulating without being addressed. I revisit global university league tables by normalizing…