There's been a bit of a buzz recently regarding a ground-breaking discovery by a young mathematician who goes by the name Hannah Cairo. You won't read anything about it in the linked article, but this teenager who is generally regarded as female is actually an imposter in that role, having started out life as a male whose Christian name has been so effectively wiped from the record that I will just be referring to him in this article as Cairo (in that, at least, I have literary company).
What interests me the most about this story is not that a teenager was able to solve a 40-year old problem in higher mathematics, but that doing so was able to propel him over several of the barriers that have been erected to keep free-thinking individuals out of higher education. Cairo, you see, will be entering a doctoral program in mathematics at the age of seventeen. What’s so unprecedented about this is that he not only doesn’t have a master’s degree in the field, the usual prerequisite for embarking on a doctrinal program—-he doesn’t even have an undergraduate degree. And for what it’s worth, he’s never even been to high school; he went directly from homeschool to taking advanced college math classes.
Now, the vast majority of universities to which Cairo applied did turn him down, citing the usual standards of their gatekeepers. But he was accepted by the graduate schools of Johns Hopkins and the University of Maryland, who were somehow able to make enough exceptions to their enrollment policies to squeeze him in.
Decades ago, I noted the irony of Lynn Conway bragging about being the only woman in her electrical engineering graduate program at MIT, when in fact Conway was a man named Robert at the time (it's also very interesting to note that Conway went on to become a tenured professor at the University of Michigan, without having jumped through the requisite hoop of first obtaining a doctoral degree). Now, I note the irony that an alleged female math prodigy can’t be celebrated as such because it would only bring attention the fact that he’s actually a male. The article can only emphasize Cairo’s youth as an unusual aspect of his accomplishment, not his alleged gender. And I have to wonder whether Cairo would have stood any chance of hurdling over the entrance barriers to the PhD program he’s now entering had he not been granted special handling due to self-inclusion in the protected class of transgender.
What does it tell you that, as a male, Cairo would have been sent back to high school to jump through dozens more hoops on his way to eventual stardom, but as a female, he found the hoops magically disappearing before him? The movie Some Like it Hot seems eerily prophetic on this note.
