>which means she was still leading at the age of 72
The current US president is 71 and on average women have longer life expectancies so it doesn't seem that high an age to be leading a group like the AMS.
The current US president is the oldest US president to date, and it was even a thing that came up in the campaign (for multiple candidates, by the way).
I remember it being an issue in the McCain campaign but not with Trump. Anyway, it's not a young age but if it's only a discussion point for president of the whole country for presiding over the AMS it shouldn't be surprising at all.
The title of the article is somewhat strange in that it sounds like Mathematics doesn't have many real world applications. On the other hand I believe that the title of the article is very effective for people to share it or even as an attention grabber.
Well, a lot of people also believe that most modern mathematics is more abstract theory and rarely applied outside of its own field. Her work seems very closely tied to physics. So I don't think explicitly mentioning that she did applied maths is bad, especially for lay people
Given the proximity to physics, that is very often untrue. Because of how abstract logic and maths are, analogies from maths often inform us about the physical world.
Much of cutting edge physics doesn't have practical applications either, whether it's dark matter and string theory, early universe cosmology or astrophysics. =)
Are you really suggesting that the majority of current research in pure math has practical applications in physics or other sciences? I just don't think that's true.
The article has a lot of good info in it. There is really more here than just the fact that someone died. I had never heard of her before, but the article was an interesting read due to the content of her work, basically.
It was a nice write-up of a Mathematician I've never heard about. HN tends to have a mix of tech startup, programming and STEM-related news. I'm not surprised to see it here.
The HN crowd must be getting older. A lot older. It reminds me of how my grandparents would go straight to the obituaries in the daily newspaper, looking for their friends.
This is shockingly disrespectful and I'm dismayed to see this on Hacker News. It seems you won't stop abusing the community with incivility so we've banned the account.
Her writeup when receiving the National Medal of Science in 1998: http://www.ams.org/notices/199903/comm-morawetz.pdf
The current US president is 71 and on average women have longer life expectancies so it doesn't seem that high an age to be leading a group like the AMS.
When it comes to Pure Mathematics, isn't that true in general?
Reqiescat in pace.
With that said, who is Cathleen Morawetz? And why should I, a random software engineer at Google, care?