Harvard University Mathematics Department Hires SECOND EVER Female Tenured Full Professor

Harvard University is considered the acme of most things academic, with its 37 billion dollar endowment and its perennial placement at the top of the college rankings. The  Mathematics department at Harvard is not the very best in the country (that distinction usually goes to Princeton University) but it is definitely well-known. The fact that they have been atrocious in the area of doversity for so long is widely known.

This week comes news that things are starting to change at Harvard, as they announced they have hired their second ever tenure female full professor, ending a six-year stint in which they literally had zero tenured female professors (by contrast Princeton has had two senior female math professors for years: Maria Chudnovsky and Sun-Yung Alice Chang).

The Daily Crimson reports:

University of California at Berkeley math professors Lauren K. Williams ’00 and Denis Auroux will join Harvard’s math department as senior faculty at the start of the next academic year, Department Chair Curtis T. McMullen said in an interview last week. 

Auroux has served as a math professor at UC Berkeley since 2009 and has published articles on subjects ranging from “symplectic submanifolds” to “Lefschetz pencils.” Williams, a former math concentrator, won a tenured associate professorship at UC Berkeley in 2013—and a full tenured professor position there in 2016—and has written extensively about cluster algebras and tropical geometry.

As a friend of mine said on Twitter this weekend in commenting on the news. "It's 2018."