Hee Oh, Mathematics
Hee Oh (PhD ’97) is the Abraham Robinson Professor of Mathematics. A former Guggenheim Fellow and winner of the Satter Prize in Mathematics and the Ho-Am Prize in Science, she became the first woman to hold tenure in Yale’s Mathematics Department in 2013. Until July 2020, when Anna Gilbert joined the department, Oh was the only tenured female faculty member in math. Mathematics is a heavily male-dominated field: in math departments across the United States, women make up only 31% of all full-time faculty positions, 15% of tenured positions at doctorate-granting universities, and only 2% of full-time tenured professors at private universities like Yale.
The gender imbalance in mathematics has persisted even as many other fields have drawn closer to gender parity. Some have argued that the reason behind this is an implicit bias based on the belief that excellence in math is an inherent trait of a genius, and not a skill that can be honed and improved upon given hard work; due to social biases, men are much more likely to be considered natural geniuses than women. This belief begins to affect females’ participation in mathematics at an early age, and progressively discourages women and girls from this line of study as they advance in their education.
Oh takes her position as a role model from aspiring female mathematicians seriously, citing the importance of representation in building confidence in more junior scholars. Asking questions at academic talks and conferences is an important part of a researcher’s growth and knowledge, but women ask many fewer questions than men in these environments. In mathematics, women-only conferences and workshops have become more common, creating an environment in which more junior women in math can feel more comfortable asking questions. One piece of advice Oh gives her students who feel hesitant to speak up: “To ask one smart question, you have to ask one hundred stupid questions.”
Selected works of Hee Oh:
- Oh, H. (2002). Uniform pointwise bounds for matrix coefficients of unitary representations and applications to Kazhdan constants. Duke mathematical journal, 113(1), 133-192.
- Oh, H & Kontorovich, A (2011). Apollonian circle packings and closed horospheres on hyperbolic 3 manifolds. Journal of the the American Mathematical Society. 24, 603—648
- Oh, H. & Winter. D. (2016). Uniform exponential mixing and resonance free region for convex cocompact congruence subgroups of SL_2(Z). Journal of the American Mathematical Society, 29, 1069-1115.
Profile by Sarah Babinski, PhD candidate in Linguistics