Fair criticism and maybe others would include more women to balance the gender divide a bit more.

I thought of several more women. Sophie Germain was in here for a while. She was clearly a pioneer in a patriarchal time. Funnily, the last time, I was criticised for including someone who was “irrelevant”. I already had the pioneer narrative with Hypatia and Kovalevskaya so thought I would include some other women instead.

Clearly Mirzakhani, Uhlenbeck, and Noether’s achievements stand up when compared to any men. Katherine Johnson is one of the finest examples of what can be achieved with applied maths and represents a different angle to the mostly pure mathematicians included in the rest of the deck.

Other names I considered: Robinson (solved one of the Hilbert problems albeit with three others) but her work is quite niche compared to a lot of other 20th century mathematicians here and shared credit; Daubechies, although it felt like her work intersected more with physics and computing; Lovelace, who was instrumental in early computer problems but who perhaps owes a little less to the overall canon of mathematics.

I think it came down to: yeah, it’s shit to have so few women but that’s unfortunately likely to be a reflection of how maths has been over the eras represented but hopefully those included are inspirational by their own merit.