Insights
Into
Human
Survival
B
arbara Keyfitz, was just seven years old the day her
father, Nathan Keyfitz, now a renowned demographer,
got his PhD. Yet even at that age, Keyfitz was quite sure his
daughter was a mathematical genius.
“She knew from the start that mathematics was the most
difficult subject in the curriculum and so it was the one she
wanted. She never deviated from that path,” Keyfitz said of
Barbara in his memoirs.
In 1970, Barbara obtained her own PhD in mathematics
from New York University and in 2004, she became the first
female Director of the Fields Institute.
“When his little girl became the Director of an international
mathematics institute, [my father] couldn’t conceal his
pleasure and pride,” says Barbara.
So Nathan Keyfitz and his wife Beatrice decided to start an
endowment to fund a public lecture series on the intersection
between mathematics and the social sciences, a natural
reflection of both of the worlds their family lived in. The Fields
Institute didn’t really have any public lectures at the time,
and the idea of bringing mathematics to non-mathematicians
and broadening the scope of the mathematical sciences was
appealing.
Ten years later, the Keyfitz lecture continues to bring together
mathematics and the social sciences, with prestigious
speakers from all over the world.
This year, Dr. Noreen Goldman from Princeton University
spoke about her “Insights Into Human Survival”. The lecture
was attended by a sell-out crowd of 130 people that included
mathematicians, students, professionals, and interested
citizens.
Goldman, who was Nathan Keyfitz’s graduate student at
Harvard, spoke about interesting “Keyfitz-inspired” problems
in demographics that she had encountered and worked on
over the years. From demographic dating of a remote atoll
in the South Pacific (though it is actually 3° north of the
equator, as was pointed out by Goldman’s future husband),
to the abnormally low life expectancy for unmarried men
in 1940s Japan (18 years lower than married men), to
whether a photograph of your face is a good predictor of life
expectancy (it is).
“She put a lot of herself into the presentation,” said Barbara.
“She presented studies and problems in the order that she
had worked on them, which was quite clever.”
Goldman’s stories highlight how statistical tools and simple
mathematical models can be used to
understand complex populations and
address important societal problems.
They also generated many questions
and led to several lively discussions
between mathematicians and non-
mathematicians at the reception
following — undoubtedly one of Nathan
Keyfitz’s goals in establishing the
series.
— Malgosia Ip
Ian Hambleton, Noreen Goldman, Barbara Keyfitz
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