Her show describes the problems she faced as one of few women in MIT's math department in the late 1980s, and the cultural differences between MIT and the University of California, Berkeley, where she went to college. It also explores why she left without finishing her dissertation after four years and ultimately decided to pursue a career in theater.

Gioia will do a free performance of “Truth Values: One Girl's Romp Through MIT's Male Math Maze” on Friday, October 9, as part of CUNY's Science and the Arts Series in New York City.

Under the Microscope: Your show is about how you were miserable in graduate school. How did you end up in that position?

Gioia de Cari: I loved doing math when I was an undergraduate. I was a top honors student at Berkeley. I also ran the math club there, which was fun. When I got to MIT, it was a lot different. No one was teaching anybody anything in the class. It was sort of like, you've already read it and we're just going to remind you. I don't know if that's always the case in math graduate school, or maybe it's just MIT. And [the subject matter] was just many, many orders of magnitude more inaccessible [than in college].

UTM: Many women talk about feeling like aliens in male-dominated departments. Did you?

GDC: Yes, definitely. I felt so alien. It seemed that the women that I observed – the other graduate students – coped by disappearing. They would wear, like, big plaid shirts and jeans, and sort of hide among and look just like the men. And I just couldn't do that. There were so many things that happened, including being asked to serve cookies at a seminar, that made me so upset that I started dressing in outrageous clothing as a way of protesting it, sort of unconsciously. I guess something snapped, is what I say in my play. I just started wearing the most outrageous things when I served these cookies. And [the clothes] were very feminine … and that really made me into an alien if I wasn't already one.

UTM: Clearly you now have a sense of humor now about your experiences. Did you have that sense of humor then?

GDC: No. I don't think I did have the same sense of humor then. I've learned over many, many years to look at this with as much humor and compassion as possible.

UTM: Do you ever miss math?

GDC: I have not missed it one day since I left. And people keep asking me this. They want to know if I have read math books. I have not opened a math book. The only book I have read that had anything whatsoever to do with math in this whole 20 years was Fermat's Enigma.

UTM: Do you feel like you use your math training in your work as a performing artist?

GDC: People say I approach my art kind of like a scientist. I am ridiculously thorough with my characters. I build these characters in my show and I know every single thing there is to know about every character and … in great scientific detail. I mean, you don't even need to do that, but it's just the way I am. If they have a disease, I know everything about the disease and how it affects the body.

Also, I do crazy things like keep spreadsheets of my auditions that keeps it a numbers game and keeps it [so I'm] not getting all involved in yeses or nos, just looking at the trends.

UTM: Speaking of rejection, do mathematicians or actors face more, in your experience?

GDC: I've always faced way more rejection in math than I have in the arts. I've had doors open and open and open and open to me in the arts. Which just doesn't make sense. I went looking for jobs when I was a grad student because my funding eventually ran out. I did get one job working at Harvard as a teaching fellow, which was very nice, but that wasn't enough and I looked for other jobs, but all I could get were singing and acting jobs. It's really ironic and bizarre and backward.

UTM: Do you think there's a lesson here for young women interested in math today?

GDC: I'm one of those people who went to graduate school and everything that could go wrong, did. Which makes for a fun show, but I'm more of a what-not-to-do example.

I'd say choose wisely where you go to graduate school. Be really careful that you fit in and you find someone really great to work with, that you know who you want to work with on your thesis before you get there. That was a problem for me.

And also be sure that it's really your passion. I think when I started graduate school ... I thought, oh, that's just a really easy path to a career and a job … and, you know, it would all work out great. But what it ended up being was one of these esoteric educations that wasn't easily applicable to a job or a career. And if it had been [applicable,] maybe it would have been easier.

UTM: How did you come to write and perform a show about these experiences?

GDC: When people would meet me and find out my background [in math], they … would corner me at parties and make me tell them my life story.

Also I started writing in, maybe, 1998. It was fun to write in a journal. And I didn't really intend to show anybody anything I wrote, and I wrote all kinds of things like poems and stories and essays and diaries, but these math stories started coming out. And I just wrote them down. And I got this opportunity to do a solo show in New York. That show was kind of like an Alice in Wonderland fantasy thing. But my director and I decided to leave in a few stories that were true about being in math. And of course the audiences just loved the math stories. That got me thinking that maybe a show that's all math stories would be really wonderful.

I've had just an absolute avalanche of success with this show, and I don't quite know why. I think math is something enticing to people that aren't in that world because it seems so exotic. And people in math and science, especially people from MIT, get an absolute kick out of the show because, of course, they recognize all this stuff and they just eat it up because it's so fun.

Photo Courtesy of Gioia de Cari.

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Ella February 01, 2010 141.14.217.239	It's so heartening to hear that someone else has found a graduate degree in mathematics is not as useful for careers as careers guides make out. I've never had a lot of trouble finding jobs, but I can't think of any job I can get (outside academia, which is really competitive) that actually uses my PhD in mathematics, except in finance. Sometimes I feel like careers guides for math majors are written by people on another planet. They all say how people can do virtually anything with a degree in mathematics, but it's like saying you can do anything after kindergarten.

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