Another Gay Math Professor in the Media

This week's New York Times Science section has an interview in the Tuesday June 17th edition about Manil Suri, 48, a full Professor of Mathematics at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County who is also a published novelist! I had heard of "the math professor author" in the newsletter of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM News).

Professor Suri has published two books, The Death of Vishnu (his debut novel which was published in 2001 to wide acclaim, from being long-listed for the Booker Prize to winning numerous industry prizes) and The Age of Shiva which came out this year.

What's most interesting to me, though, was not only finding another mathematician who is a person of color who has numerous outside interests out of mathematics, but that we also do the same kind of mathematics (numerical analysis!)

Another interesting facet of Professor Suri (which didn't seem to come out in the SIAM News story) was that he is also gay (which did make it into the New York Times interview):

Q. HOW OLD WHERE YOU WHEN YOU ARRIVED IN THE UNITED STATES?

A. Twenty. I had obtained a fellowship to Carnegie-Mellon in Pittsburgh. Immediately, I was surprised how easy it was to set down roots here. Unlike immigrants from other parts of the world, I had the language. I’d seen American movies and had read Mad magazine. There was no culture shock.

In America, I finally had a chance to investigate my own sexuality and take small hesitant steps in that direction. Today, I’m with my partner of 18 years.

One thing I was shocked by was how much Americans hated mathematics. You almost needed an antidefamation league for mathematicians. People actually took pleasure in explaining how bad they were at it. There’s a doll here that says, “I hate math.” You wouldn’t be able to sell such a doll in a sari.