FINDING BALANCE
Sam Townsend presents his monthly brain teaser
When will Parliament achieve gender equality?
With International Women’s Day coming up on 8 March and the recent 100-year anniversary of (some) women getting the vote, I thought this month would be a good time to specifically look at women in maths.
Despite still being hugely underrepresented (only around 6 per cent of maths professors at British universities are female), women have made a significant contribution to the sum total of mathematical knowledge over recent decades, including the first women winning the Fields Medal (the mathematical equivalent of the Nobel Prize) in 2014.
For the purposes of this column however, this is not of much use. Over the past few decades maths has become so technical and abstract that my chances of understanding any work produced in that period are minimal, let alone describe it in 600 words or fewer.
Looking back before the 20th century for examples of accessible mathematical work by women shows there were exceptionally few female mathematicians, which is perhaps unsurprising as women were not allowed to study maths much before 1900. In fact it was 1874 before the first women, Sofia Kovalevskaya of Russia, gained a doctorate in maths in modern Europe.
However, there were women throughout history who managed to circumvent these rules, notably Sophie Germain who managed to study for a while undetected at Ecole Polytechnique under a male pseudonym. Unfortunately the research she went on to do was significantly advanced and no easier to describe than 20th century work.
This being the case, I have decided this month to instead pose a mathematical puzzle about women as opposed to a puzzle based on women’s mathematical research:
There are 650 MPs who sit in the House of Commons. Of those elected at the 2017 general election, 208 were female, up from 191 in 2015. If Parliament continues to gain 17 female MPs at each election, in what year will Parliament be balanced 50:50 between men and women?
I am naively assuming for the purposes of this question that the Fixed-term Parliaments Act will be upheld with elections held exactly every five years from 2017 and also that the number of MPs in Parliament remains at 650.
If you manage to find an answer, do you think it is realistic?
Tap here for a hint Tap here for the answer
If you would like to get in contact with me about the puzzles or suggest a future puzzle for this column, please email me at maths.challenge@independent.co.uk
I can’t promise I will manage to reply to all emails but I will get through as many as I can.