She now works at Arcadia University in Glenside, Pennsylvania, where she teaches an original class called "Truth and Beauty: Mathematics in Literature." She lives in Philadelphia.

Under the Microscope: You're a mathematician and a writer. For you, which came first?

Marion Cohen: Math is my passion. If I didn't know math, I guess I'd say that writing is my passion, but there's something that hits the high notes that's very special about math. 

I first thought that I'd get my Ph.D. in math, which I did, and I would get a job teaching somewhere and I would have children and I would be a full-time working mother. I was not the most practical person then -- and I'm still not, but of course I understand more about myself and about the world.

Being impractical, I just wrote a thesis. I knew that people usually had an adviser, and the adviser would give them them a problem, and arrange things for the thesis committee and so on.

What I did was have an idea, and I worked on it. That was the kind of thing that I'd been doing since high school, just working on my own work. And this time the idea was more sophisticated. It was in abstract algebra, but it was also an offshoot of something that wasn't quite as abstract, ... generalized functions, to be short. So I wrote up a thesis without an adviser. I had had an adviser for my master's thesis, ... but he left Wesleyan and he didn't take me with him. So I was left high and dry, and I asked the various professors at Wesleyan if they would be my adviser, and approve my thesis, because I had written it already, and they all said that they didn't understand the thesis, it wasn't their field. It was a field I'd made up, for one thing.

The chairperson suggested that I try to find an adviser outside of Wesleyan. [A fellow mathematician] said, "Well, since it's connected to distribution theory, how about if I communicate it -- that's the term -- to Laurent Schwartz," who invented distribution theory. She sent him the thesis, and Laurent Schwartz did approve it, and he sent me a letter approving it. And at first Wesleyan kind of hemmed and hawed about it. So Laurent Schwartz gave them what they needed, which was a note written to them saying on no uncertain terms, "This thesis is original, creative, worthy of a Ph.D." My first child was three months old.

UTM: And then you tried to find a full-time position as a professor at a university?

MC: Yes. But my adviser was a., in France, and b., a strong opponent of the Vietnam War at that time. He was also an ardent feminist, which is why he took the time to read my thesis. But he was in political disfavor in this country, and he was not in this country. He wrote me letters of recommendation, but he couldn't push for me, he couldn't get me a job. I did get jobs, but not that full-time job that lasted all my life. And at some point my husband got a job here, in Philadelphia, so there was the "two-body problem" as they say, and we were not willing to solve it by living apart. It wasn't that important to me. What was important to me was doing math and living a life with math.

I worked part-time. Mostly I taught graduate courses. I got pregnant with my second child, a boy, and [then] I wasn't particularly interested in full-time.

UTM: So where did the writing come in?

MC: I've written all my life. When I was 11, I decided to write my inner autobiography. That year I realized I had an inner life. But I never thought I'd be published.

Fast-forward to when I was 31, 32, something like that. My second child was two. I took a women's writing workshop. I wrote about motherhood. I realized that I had things to say to other mothers. Some local publications published what I had to say.

"Crossing the Equal Sign" -- you could say it's a culmination. I was working on a problem, which I was particularly passionate about, and it turned out to be a very difficult problem. I think it's the best math work I've ever done. It turned out not to be original; it turned out somebody else had done it, but that's also another story. But at the time, I was so passionately involved with this problem, I thought about it most of the time, I dreamed about it at night, and it was just really deep the way I felt. I think the poems -- which are now in the book -- express that. It talks about math in general, it talks about my regular life -- at the time, my husband had entered a nursing home, he had [multiple sclerosis] and it was very advanced, [and] I had four children, the youngest was eight or nine.

It turned out that this was a problem in a field called graph theory -- which I didn't know about at the time -- and it had already been done. I wasn't that upset because, for me, I had to know the answer to the problem, and I got the answer. And so it didn't matter that much that I couldn't publish it. It would've been great. [But] I got the wonderful experience, and the poems and the book.

UTM: You teach a course on math in literature. What readings would you recommend to people interested in the topic?

MC: It wasn't easy to find a book, because I needed an anthology. The only anthology that really works for me ... is "Strange Attractors: Poems of Love and Mathematics." I have two poems in it. There's a lot of modern poems in it, and some not-so-modern poems in it. Rita Dove has two poems in it, and that famous poem "Let me count the ways" is in it.

Strangely enough there's no anthology of math fiction. But there is one -- I kind of settled for it -- it's called "Fantasia Mathematica," and it came out in the 50s, so there's plenty of sexist stuff in there. All the mathematicians are men, and all the family members and so on are women, basically. A new edition came out in the 90s, which is just the same as the old edition. 

Also, there's a lot online that's in the public domain, like the story "An Old Arithmetician." I love that story.

Photo courtesy of Jon Johanning. 

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JoAnne Growney February 02, 2010 173.10.172.82	It's a very nice surprise to see this article about Marion Cohen -- she is the ultimate Renaissance Woman and high on the list of "people I admire" -- for her math and poetry achievements and also for her warm humanity.
Lori R. February 10, 2010 68.192.154.84	It's a little sad that more polymaths (haha) don't exist nowadays. I love hearing about anything that crosses "discipline lines". I wish we had classes like that when I went to university.

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