Mina Teicher, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus, Dept. of Mathematics and Gonda Brain Research Institute, Bar-Ilan University – Research Professor of Mathematics, University of Miami – Director, WIMSA, Advancing Women in Mathematics Across the Americas
When Mina Teicher was four, she met her first love: Numbers. “Even when I was little, I was always counting and doing exercises with numbers,” she says. “And this passion remained with me.” Her first real job, in fact, was tutoring her neighbor’s nine-year-old daughter in math. Mina was ten.
If you love math, it’s more than a school subject. Math invites you into an elegant universe that follows rules, where the world is consistent and clear, where answers live and they are right or wrong. If you love math — I mean really love math — math loves you back and gives you a rational and beautiful system for explaining and adoring the world that’s been called the “poetry of logic” and “the music of reason.”
Mina wanted other girls to experience that beauty — to be easeful citizens of Universe Math, too. It became a vocation; throughout elementary and high school, she tutored girls in the language of numbers.
But she also saw girls paying a price for being good at math. As teens, girls “get the feeling that boys don’t like girls who are too smart,” says Mina. “So, if you are 15 and have a chance to go out with the coolest boy in class, you make yourself a little bit less smart, a little less clever in the conversation.”
At Tel Aviv University, she earned a bachelor’s degree, master’s degree and doctorate. Friends and advisors tried to steer her into engineering where she could apply her mathematical gifts; she loved purely conceptual math more. Her concentration became algebraic geometry, in which techniques for solving abstract algebraic equations can translate into physical shapes such as lines and curves. NASA scientists use algebraic geometry to define orbits; CAD (computer-aided design) and 3-D printing use algebraic geometry to build products you can hold in your hand.
The brilliance of Mina’s work earned her an invitation to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, where Albert Einstein had once been a professor. “It’s the shrine of mathematics,” says Mina, “and it changed my career.” She reveled in an environment dedicated to pure intellectual inquiry. But by the end of two years, she was a mother with a young daughter. She wanted her little girl to grow up closer to family. Mina went home to Israel.
Different universities came courting then and she traveled the world, doing research and teaching in Germany, Italy, China, South Africa, New Zealand, and the U.S. As her career took off, Mina’s first marriage ended; she married again to a man with two children. Suddenly she was running a blended family and a very busy, successful career as a math scientist at Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv.
Life changed again the day she was approached to serve as Chairman of Bar-Ilan’s Department of Mathematics and Computer Science. Mina scoffed at the request.
“I’m a scientist. I don’t do management,” she said. They wouldn’t take “no” for an answer. Warily, she stepped into the leadership role and gradually transformed the mathematics department into a strong, well-funded entity. Just as she prepared to finish her stint and pass the baton to another leader, the president of the university came to her and asked her to serve as the Vice President for Research.
Being Vice President for Research at Israel’s second-largest academic institution raised Mina’s profile. It also changed her perspective on mathematics. For decades, she’d lived in the realm of pure theory and inquiry for inquiry’s sake. In her new role, to make the case for funding math research, she began to talk about and understand applied mathematics not as some lesser creature but as essential to everything everywhere moving forward.
Most intriguing to Mina, she saw mathematics playing a role in advancing our understanding of the brain. At age 45, she says, “I started over” by becoming a professor of computational neuroscience at the Gonda Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center at Bar-Ilan. Her work there applies mathematical models and abstractions (among other things) to understanding how the human nervous system develops and functions. “People like to talk about artificial intelligence,” she says, “but we are still working just to understand normal intelligence.”
In 2005, Israel’s government asked Mina to serve as chief scientist at Israel’s Ministry of Science and Technology. In that role, she was, among other responsibilities, in charge of publicly funded research and the Israel Space Agency. She traveled the world and lobbied to make Israel an Associate Member of the European Union Research and Development Program. She also represented Israel in many International Bodies, including the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
But something, meanwhile, was bothering her. She saw how hard it was for women to follow her up through the ranks of academia. “We call it the leaking pipeline,” she says. It starts as girls dropping out of math classes in their teens. It continues post-doctorate, when women must relocate to pursue appointments at other universities and hesitate to disrupt their husbands’ careers. Then, if they do go forward, there’s bitter competition at the top to win tenure and a full professorship. Right as women hit their peak years for having babies and raising a family, they are also expected to generate original research, write papers and win grants within a strict five-year span to move from a tenure-track position to a tenured position. Many simply don’t make it.
“There’s an infinite demand for women in STEM, but for the number to grow, women need to see other women succeed,” says Mina.
Mina worked to help pass new rules in Israel that require universities to give women an additional year to complete the academic requirements for a professorship for each child she has had during that five-year period. The new rules give women breathing room to pursue both the families and the careers they want.
Today, Mina is a Research Professor of Mathematics at the University of Miami and running a multilevel program to Advance Women In Mathematics Across the Americas (WIMSA). She is guiding Ph.D. students as an Emeritus Professor in Bar-Ilan’s Mathematics Department and at the Gonda Brain Research Institute.
For 25 years, she served as Director of the Research Institute for Mathematics at Bar-Ilan University, named after Emmy Noether, a role especially close to her heart. Although Emmy Noether was one of the most brilliant mathematicians of any era — whose partnership with Albert Einstein helped him clarify his Theory of Relativity and whose work revolutionized the field of particle physics to this day — as a woman she was denied permission to join the faculty of Göttingen University and had to teach for no pay. After she fled to the United States, she had to teach in an all-women’s college, even though she was a great mathematician who should have been invited to join the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.
Mina also thinks sometimes of her grandmother, for whom she is named. She bore 14 children, one of whom became Mina’s mother. When Mina’s grandmother told Mina’s grandfather that she wanted her girls to go to school along with her sons, he replied, “Why? They’re just going to get married and have children.” Mina’s grandmother has been described as “a saint,” but on this occasion, evidently, she slammed her hand down on the table. And won the fight. Her daughters got an education.
“My mother was very clever,” says Mina, although she never went past high school. Instead, she got married, had Mina and her brother, and worked in her husband’s antique bookstore. Mina remembers her father — who never earned a university degree of his own — reading constantly, loving knowledge for knowledge’s sake, and talking to students. He let the ones too poor to buy books just sit and read on the stairs inside the store. He knew what it was to have to sleep on the floor of a classmate’s home because his own parents couldn’t afford room and board.
“Was it bad?” Mina asked him one time about loving learning over food and comfort. “Oh, no,” he replied. “It was great. I had a very good coat. And a coat can be a pillow or a blanket or a mattress.”
“That’s the only advice he ever gave me,” says Mina — “have a lot of coats.”