LEADER 00000pam  2200337 i 4500 
003    DLC 
005    20201026135247.7 
008    200530s2020    nyua     b    001 0 eng   
010      2020014347 
020    9781541646506|q(hardcover) 
040    LBSOR/DLC|beng|erda|cDLC|dIMmBT|dUtOrBLW 
042    pcc 
092    155.33|bCHE 
100 1  Cheng, Eugenia,|eauthor. 
245 10 x + y :|ba mathematician's manifesto for rethinking gender
       /|cEugenia Cheng. 
246 3  x plus y 
250    First US edition. 
264  1 New York :|bBasic Books,|c2020. 
300    x, 272 pages :|billustrations ;|c22 cm 
336    text|btxt|2rdacontent 
337    unmediated|bn|2rdamedia 
338    volume|bnc|2rdacarrier 
504    Includes bibliographical references and index. 
520    "Eugenia Cheng can't help thinking like a mathematician. 
       She also can't help thinking like a woman. After all, 
       she's both. But there seems like there must be a clear 
       tension. She had to learn to be a mathematician, for one 
       thing, and-in the popular imagination, anyway-mathematics 
       seems very "male," the domain of individualistic geniuses 
       with terrible social skills, pursuing university tenure 
       and fame. Those traits, however, aren't really what it 
       means to do math: as Cheng has shown through her three 
       previous books, what it really means to think like a 
       mathematician is to see past the distracting, superficial 
       details of things to find their essences. When she turned 
       that thinking upon gender, she found, there wasn't much 
       essence to speak of at all. But what she did find there 
       has become this book. At the heart of x + y are two 
       concepts: not masculine or feminine, but what Cheng calls 
       ingressive and congressive personalities. Ingressive 
       people are competitive, independent, bold, risk-taking, 
       self-assured, and often have one-track minds: these are 
       the people Cheng worked with in high finance, the sort of 
       people who might do well as surgeons or daredevils. 
       Congressive people, on the other hand, focus on society 
       and community, take the needs of others into account, 
       emphasize interconnectedness, and tend to collaborate. As 
       a society, we associate ingressive personalities with men 
       and congressive personalities with women. And herein lies 
       the problem-the source not just of gender inequality, but 
       a great deal of individual unhappiness. When a 
       mathematician like Cheng pursues the issue abstractly, she
       finds nothing uniquely male about ingression or female 
       about congression. But she does find that, from 
       standardized exams to Nobel prizes, society fundamentally 
       rewards the ingressive, thereby forcing many people-
       including Cheng herself, one upon a time-to learn and 
       practice a suite of behaviors that they might not have 
       otherwise. To Cheng, it would be a failure to think that a
       bunch of bad-ass female CEOs would represent true progress,
       or that the world will be better when men get in touch 
       with their feminine side, because both those scenarios are
       predicated on faulty premises and bad abstractions. x + y 
       is a call to action, offering a vision of how we can use 
       the power of abstraction to make the world less 
       competitive, that is, more congressive, and to solve 
       gender inequality, not by encouraging men to be less 
       aggressive, or women to be more, but by realizing that-
       once you start thinking about the problem like a 
       mathematician-it becomes clear that most of what we 
       ascribe to gender has nothing to do with gender at all"--
       |cProvided by publisher. 
650  0 Sex differences (Psychology)|xResearch|xMethodology. 
650  0 Sex role|xResearch|xMethodology. 
650  0 Social sciences|xMathematical models. 
650  0 Categories (Mathematics) 
650  0 Mathematics|xSocial aspects.