Sidebar: Success in the World of ‘Macho-boy Math’

Last year, Kelley Harris ‘09 survived Math 55, even though she lacked one of the class’s common denominators—a Y chromosome.

She wasn’t alone. Fellow sophomores Hannah Chung ’09 and Hana Kitasei ’09, a Crimson photo editor, joined Harris for the first semester. They were three girls in a class of 21 (if you can do the math, that’s approximately 14.285 percent). But Chung said those numbers weren’t a problem. “I’m used to being in a class where the ratio is skewed,” she explains.

How did a Harris cope in the infamous math class?

“It was certainly very hard,” Harris says. “I learned how to think in a whole new way.” Harris explains that even though she was a girl in a class full of boys, she never felt as though she had crossed enemy lines. It helped that she had previously met fellow classmates Chung, Scott D. Kominers ’09, John D. Lesieutre ’09, and Dmitry Taubinsky ’09 at the Research Science Institute sponsored by the Center for Excellence in Education held at MIT. She also bumped into Neal Wadhwa ’09 at the Intel Science Talent Search and Shrenik N. Shah ’09 at Stanford University’s Adventures of the Mind.

But when spring rolled around, Harris soon found herself without any female colleagues. “Second semester, it was just me,” Harris says. Chung, now enrolled in Math 122, says she decided to switch to Math 25 on her own. “I was more capable of handling the work load in 25,” Chung says. “I was sad about leaving the class, but it was a better choice for me.”

Despite the asymptotic decline in female students (for the uninitiated, that means the number of girls in the class was approaching one), Harris claims that Math 55 didn’t feel any different second semester. “It wasn’t really that different because the people I worked with [on problem sets] were all there. That was the basis of my experience.”

Math 55ers stick together, Harris says, and this fellowship continues throughout Harvard—all the way into the upper level math classes. Harris continues to work with fellow Math 55 graduates Lesieutre and Shah in Math 213a, “Complex Analysis.” They even blocked together this year.

So what is Harris’s advice for girls hoping to join the ranks of Math 55 graduates?

“Don’t take the macho-boy math thing too seriously,” Harris warns. “Just have fun.”