My Math and Physics Journey: Why I Identify As the Brene Brown of Law, Even if I’m Also An Essentialist

              When I first decided to pursue physics, I was almost verbatim told that math and physics is a “young man’s game.” Really? I don’t think so, or at least my own physics abilities absolutely delighted me and surprised me. I expected to be decent, but I had no idea I would accidentally derive Clairaut’s Theorem in the class I wrongfully failed at Cornell, where the male teacher did not even know what Clairaut’s Theorem was, nor did my tutors, or the TA. It also wasn’t in the textbook, which was an engineering textbook, and I only discovered it later in my favorite math textbook of all time.

            I’ve heard many men, and many male scientists, get annoyed when they discover their "inn"ovations have already been invented. Really? When this happens to me, I think, “wow, I’m really smart, because someone even smarter than me came up with this exact same idea,” even if Clairaut in Clairaut’s Theorem was a literal child prodigy and he had this idea, a gorgeous theorem about partial derivatives, when he was a kid, and this makes many mathematicians feel bad. To those scientists and mathematicians who get annoyed at savants like Clairaut, the game theory innovation I am working on was invented by Freeman Dyson when he was in his 80s, and also by William Press, so it’s not too late for you and has never ever been too late for you to have a big idea.

                And to people who think they are too old to learn a new field, I strongly disagree, and there’s great neuroscience that supports this, and some studies on brain plasticity show that the brain rewires its synapses every seven years (though Chat GPT disagrees .  . . I’ll take on Chat GPT any day of the week given that I personally researched this question at a veteran’s hospital near Dartmouth when I was a college student). So, humans can rewire their brain, and essentially become different people every seven years, which may explain why couples sometimes get divorced at the seven year mark, also known as the “seven year itch,” a movie with Marilyn Monroe. (Monroe, incidentally, has the saddest story ever. She was an actual genius and a rape victim, and was written off by one of her own husbands, the famous playwright Arthur Miller, even while she knew Checkov, and improved Miller’s plays and Miller and his friends mocked Monroe for her beauty and stereotyped her intellect as not as smart as them, after Monroe escaped from her jealous, controlling, baseball-playing ex Joe DiMaggio, who kicked the crap out of Monroe, and Monroe still had to wake up every day and star in films and be on her A-game.) Other recent work suggests old humans, like old dogs, really can learn new tricks, including women. I commend the work of Barbara Oakley to show that there’s a real woman, who worked for the military as a translator, and who took it into her head to go back to school in her 50s, and became a rock star professor of engineering. 

            But this post is partially about why I’m a feminist, and also an essentialist at the exact same time. To be clear, I absolutely reject junk science and the horrific tropes that caused the former president of Harvard University, Lawrence Summers, to incorrectly and publicly state that women weren’t as good at science as men, and he actually had the bad judgment to voice these sentiments out loud, and was rightly voted out by the Harvard faculty as a result. Justice! I also reject as sexist the infamous Google manifesto, and can say that, in my view, the reason that women aren’t in STEM to the degree that men are, is directly due to sexism in math and science classes.  I am not opposed to male mathematicians and physicists, at all, but I do think there’s an idea that to promote a mentee that mentee should be a “mini me” and remind the mentor of themselves. I reject this view of mentoring, and in my view, it deprives many talented women of mentoring opportunities because science is largely made of up men. 

            So, there’s a gross lack of women in STEM. Equally, I’ll speak for myself because I absolutely am not authorized to speak for anyone else. And that’s to say I know things differently from some of the brilliant male scientists I’ve worked with and greatly respect, and that there’s a well-known phenomenon called “intuition” that, in my view, many women are simply better at. Obviously, there are exceptions, and I want to recommend a book to everyone called “Women’s Ways of Knowing.” This book suggests that many women, like certain famous male scientists, including Einstein himself, are better at intuition and something called “inner knowing” and that notable male scientists like Carl Jung himself believed in and used.

Some male scientists reject intuition, and argue against it because the scientific method is largely premised on doubt and skepticism, but many outstanding male scientists used and use intuition instead including Carl Jung (who famously foresaw World War I, and had a dream on a train about blood flowing in a river) and Einstein himself used intuition. I have a book that I bought in 2009 or 2010 and it’s called “What we believe but cannot prove,” and it contains a lengthy list of famous male and female scientists including Jared Diamond, Richard Dawkins, Freeman Dyson, George Dyson, Steven Pinker, Paul Bloom, Esther Dyson, Martin Nowak, and Carlo Rovelli, who all used and use intuition and faith rather than skepticism and doubt as their general approach to their research. Einstein himself used intuition so much that, in fact, that he was so certain he would win the Nobel Prize that as a tool to extract himself from an unhappy marriage, he told his wife he’d give her the money from the Prize as an actual divorce settlement. She thought about it, and was equally certain he’d win, and she said yes, and they got divorced, even though this was years before he won the Prize. He also was so arrogant/confident he’d win the Nobel Prize that he boasted that if the experimentalists did not confirm his theories, they’d be wrong (once again, Chat GPT gets this wrong, too, and this is why I don’t use AI, but I cannot help that Google attempts to force me to and displays AI results when I look for my sources). Einstein carefully cultivated his reputation as an eccentric scientist who was humble and even mussed up his hair for photographers (though the source is a book about Hawking, it discusses Einstein). Einstein was not modest, but that was his media persona. Anyway, Einstein and many other male and female scientists used intuition, and so do many women and I think that if women were given a fair shake in math and physics, they’d probably be as good or better than their male counterparts. 

            Returning to essentialism, let’s just say I have two cats, one male and one female. (Named Jean Paul and Simone after French existentialists, though I did not pick their names. Don’t blame this pretension on me.) And I’ve seen my darling male cat who I adore with every fiber of my heart and soul attempt to bully and attempt to what looks like rape my female cat. And I think the statistics are clear: Women rarely commit violence or rape, and women in general have their biggest fear as fearing for their safety, whereas men fear humiliation. Which is more important? Safety or ego? The answer is clear. 

            But ego matters, and if I’ve inadvertently humiliated anyone, I apologize from the bottom of my whole heart and soul and that’s because it’s not what I stand for. I stand for a more loving world, exactly like Brene Brown, and the work of other game theorists who teach humiliation is not a tool anyone should use: We (humans) should use empathy where possible, and where not possible, containment or isolation, while we should give everyone who wants to a chance to redeem themselves because no one who wants redemption is beyond it, and that’s the work of Common Justice, which I saw mocked on LinkedIn. What’s the alternative, folks? Incarceration? As Dorothy Roberts suggests, incarceration leads to even more violence and is extremely harmful, and the numbers speak for themselves, and Common Justice and other restorative justice programs just beat prison on the cold hard numbers. Incarceration is bad, though I have never been to prison or jail except in my capacity as a law clerk, and as for humiliation, if I’ve accidentally done to people I care about, I'm sorry, and it is a terrible thing to experience, and I should know because I’ve also been humiliated, and I reject it “cat”egorically. 

No one deserves to be humiliated, even white men, and we all deserve to be treated with love, dignity, respect, and fairness. Even Donald Trump doesn’t deserve to be humiliated, though the jokes I’ve made might suggest otherwise. I’m attempting to be playful, lighthearted, and fun, and use existential humor because these are really dark times, but I don’t actually suggest seriously Melania give DT an ultimatum and am against ultimatums because they are a bad tool and use leverage and force when it’s best to be gentle if you have a request. In addition, ultimatums tend to backfire, and to the extent I’ve ever used them, I’ll never do it again. I stand for a more peaceful and loving world, even if I also think DT is an existential threat, and even if I also think that Harvard and Columbia should stand up to Trump. Jesus did yell and cause scenes, but equally to my knowledge did not humiliate anyone and his message was one of love and turning the other cheek, even if Jesus also spoke truth to power and that action eventually toppled the Roman Empire. And I’m just a human, also speaking truth to power, so both/and, and as should be clear it's not my goal to topple democracy, but to save it if we as a society still can.

            P.S. I am not opposed to Chat GPT or AI, even if I don’t use it myself to write my scholarship or blog. Many humans use AI, including amazing scientists at Google, and there are incredible breakthroughs being done in physics with the help of AI, and actual Nobel Laureates are using AI to effectuate their breakthroughs.

            P.P.S. For people regularly reading this blog, I of all persons, have the right to stand for forgiveness because I’ve been profoundly wronged in my life, and if I can forgive, then surely other people can too. Forgiveness is highly personal, and I could never forgive on behalf of a third party, but I will say that the people I most respect on the entire planet were forgiving, and at the end of the day, many civil rights heroes and icons forgave George Wallace after he nearly killed them. 

-Cortelyou C. Kenney (6/8/25, 6:34 am PT)