Extracts from Fern Hunt Interviews

Fern Hunt has been highly successful in her career and has been interviewed many times. She has spoken often about her own education and career. She has also spoken about her views on teaching, on mathematics in general and many other related topics. We give extracts from several different interviews as well as a couple of reports of interviews. We have not identified the source of each quote but they are all from references listed after Fern Hunt's biography.

1. Getting through an illness.

After I finished my dissertation at Howard, I had some surgery, which should have been fairly routine, but the upshot of it was that I was allergic to the anaesthetic, and I got toxic hepatitis. The stress of finishing the dissertation and the illness was like fighting and squeezing my way out of a very narrow, tight opening. It left me tired and a little uncertain about the future and whether I would be able to do any research. I did start working again, but it was Jim Donaldson who always had a high opinion of me, and I appreciated that. He would say, "Don't worry; you'll find a problem and you'll do it!" He just took that for granted.

2. How Jim Donaldson helped Hunt.

In 1974, while I was a graduate student at the Courant Institute, I attended the International Congress of Mathematicians held in Vancouver, British Columbia. The trip was a reward to myself for having passed the oral preliminary examination the previous year. While there, I met Jim Donaldson, the first African American mathematician I met in person. But I was puzzled. His conversational style, slow and deliberate, was disconcerting at first to my New York City ear. He would often begin with a sly observation, then grab your attention as his voice rolled forward to a witty and/or hilarious ending punctuated by loud laughter. His tone was wry and ironic, but always humane. Puzzlement soon turned to admiration and respect. As it turned out, the next year Donaldson was a visiting professor at Courant but we rarely met. However, near the end of his term, he talked to me about the new PhD program at Howard and that if I was looking for an academic position after finishing my degree, I should look him up. At the time, I felt too far away from finishing to do more than put this idea aside. But as fate would have it, it came in handy.

By the time I arrived at Howard in the fall semester of 1978, Donaldson had hired a lively and diverse group of younger faculty eager to do research and innovative teaching. This was greatly encouraging to me. Although my early work involved singular perturbations of differential and parabolic partial differential equations, our mathematical interests could not be farther apart. I was then very interested in applications to population genetics and ecology and there were very few connections with his interests aside from the theory of semigroups. Moreover, I was a new researcher in mathematical biology, a field that was still relatively new with few conferences, journals, and colleagues. Despite this, Donaldson was extremely supportive of my work and of the future of the field itself. Indeed, there are several researchers at Howard working in that area today. His greatest impact as a mentor however was a consequence of his superb administrative skills. Whether it was threading National Science Foundation proposals through the university bureaucracy or helping me secure funds allowing time off to do research at the National Institutes of Health and later at the National Institutes of Standards and Technology, he was calm, sagacious, and inventive. I illustrate with one of many examples. In 1980, I got a visiting research position at the National Institutes of Health for a year. The costs would be paid largely by the National Institutes of Health. A month before I was scheduled to begin, the National Institutes of Health announced that due to budget cuts only six-months salary would be paid. By then, Howard had approved an entire academic year of leave. Because of the change in the National Institutes of Health policy we were forced to start the application process all over again with less time to complete it. Jim helped me secure a cost-matching agreement between the National Institutes of Health and Howard that allowed me to take the position as planned.

3. Has there been progress with discrimination?

I received a PhD degree in 1978 late enough so that I rarely encountered overt discrimination, I did encounter racist and sexist attitudes and practices that limited the progress of so many women of my generation. The business of mathematical research can be a real grind for anyone. Being an African American woman meant that I was for the most part on the periphery of the mentoring networks. I wasted more time in blind alleys and unprofitable research connections than I should have and survived mainly by hard work, driving curiosity, street smarts and luck. Through my work with the Association for Women in Mathematics I also saw the role that social, economic, personal, and family networks play in maintaining attitudes that needlessly exclude people. Sexist attitudes and practices in the mathematical community have declined slowly over the years. There has been visible progress across the board but still largely for white women. It has occurred sometimes ironically enough, because of these same networks of family and personal relationships that women of colour do not have. Thus it has been difficult for me to see how to move things forward faster for women of colour particularly African American women within the Association for Women in Mathematics framework. Fortunately two members of the Association for Women in Mathematics, Rhonda Hughes of Bryn Mawr College and Sylvia Bozeman of Spelman College, developed the EDGE programme. It at once addressed a critical pipeline issue of women transitioning from college to graduate school and created a multi-racial community of professional support. The Infinite Possibilities Conferences are another exciting development and they offer the possibility of a multiracial network of support for straight and queer women. I see an opportunity for the Association for Women in Mathematics in supporting this work and in reaching out to women and LGBTQ+ women outside the US. Much of the progress we have attained so far is at risk however.

4. Helping to set up the Olga Taussky-Todd Lecture held at each ICIAM Congress.

My most satisfying achievement during my time on Association for Women in Mathematics committees was my work in 2006 in helping to establish the ICIAM (International Conference of Industrial and Applied Mathematics), new lecture award named after Olga Taussky Todd. A major figure in the development of both pure and applied linear algebra in the twentieth century, Taussky Todd worked at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (then the National Bureau of Standards) during World War II. I was working there at the time so when Barbara Keyfitz, then president of the Association for Women in Mathematics, asked me to jumpstart an effort to develop the award I readily agreed. I was tasked with reaching out to the European women's organisation, European Women in Mathematics to get their approval and cooperation. Even though email was available, cell phones were not yet widely used so communication by long distance landline was awkward and slow. With persistence we were able to set up an awards committee and present a joint proposal to the organising committee of ICIAM. It was a great satisfaction that one of my suggestions (although I wasn't on the awards committee), Pauline van den Driessche was selected as the inaugural Olga Taussky Todd lecturer.

5. Would you advise a black girl to go to a black college?

Not necessarily. A lot would depend on the personality of the student. There was a point, when I was teaching at Howard, when I would say that they should definitely try to get into Dartmouth College, for example. At that time there wasn't the racial exclusion that there had been in previous years. The majority of colleges were integrated. They were admitting students of all colours and actively seeking black students. I advised students at that time to try to go to majority colleges, especially with their previous experience of being in predominantly black schools. You need to meet other kinds of people; I felt that was very good and very healthy. We need to do that as a society, we need to get out of our collective ghettos. However, in recent years there has been a growing intolerance, and I have met some of the students who have transferred from majority colleges to Howard. There is a terrific economic anxiety among white students right now, and some of them seem to be taking it out on black students on these campuses.

I also find that sometimes black students are forming little cliques on the majority campuses. So the situation is very complex. I no longer hold the unequivocal position that yes, you should definitely go to the majority, or yes, you should definitely go to a black college; there are pluses and minuses with both choices. It would depend very much on the individual.

6. How should you encourage shy students?

I think the most important thing would be to gradually, without pouncing, try to gain their confidence. People love to be flattered. Don't become unrealistic. But flatter them. Compliment them. Because I can assure you that if you're a white male faculty member, you probably are not really aware of the extent to which black students are not complimented. Complimenting encourages. Don't be extravagant to the point that it's ridiculous, but be encouraging. If you can, gain that student's confidence.

Try to take a genuine interest; people will see that, and they will open up a little bit. This may seem intrusive, but will be appreciated.

7. Mathematics as a human activity.

The point is that as soon as there was enough to eat and the environment was relatively stable, humans were involved in mathematical activity. But this kind of broad vision of mathematics is important in order to secure its future. There is nothing that says that mathematics ought to continue as a cultural activity. Indeed, there are many arts and crafts that have been lost as the civilisations that invented them declined. Books of Euclid were lost in the fire at the Alexandria library - a significant blow to the development of mathematics. It would be terrible to think of something like that happening now, but it could. It is better to invest in as many people as possible to convey the idea that science and mathematics elevate the mind and the spirit and that they are something that people will always need. Somehow that's not being transmitted. Somehow we're letting our machines, our greed, and our own spiritual emptiness devour everything. So the enterprises of teaching and research in mathematics - whether in academia or out-spreading the knowledge we gain to as many as possible are not only noble activities, they are also the conservative thing to do.

8. Make mathematics more inclusive.

Mathematics is a lot like sports. There is a lot of talent and many kinds of talent. Take basketball as an analogy. We all appreciate players like Larry Bird, Bill Russell, Bill Walton, as well as Nate (Tiny) Archibald or Isiah Thomas. They have (had) very different abilities and styles of play. Yet they were all marvellous players. So the pool of talent is broad. And when you consider Patrick Ewing, Magic Johnson, Julius (Dr J) Erving, and finally Michael Jordan, you also see an almost infinite depth of talent. There is probably a broad consensus that Jordan is the greatest player the game has produced, but does anyone think that diminishes the contributions of Julius Erving? Would Jordan have achieved as much without the help of the less talented Scottie Pippen? Mathematics is like that. No matter how good you actually are, there is definitely somebody who can run rings around you. If you encounter these people, it can be intimidating. This, with the fact that mathematics is a field that a lot of people have trouble with, causes a great deal of anxiety both within and outside the profession. I think we should minimise it by trying to be a little more inclusive, by trying to look for the talent people have, rather than dismissing them for the talent they lack.

It's important, especially when you're trying to increase the pool of so-called underachievers, to find ways to encourage them. There are a lot of reasons for poor performance. There are more reasons for poor performance than there are for good performance. It makes things much, much more complex.

9. Alicia Richardson reports on an interview with Hunt in 2002.

Currently, Dr Hunt is doing work in bioinformatics. This is a relatively new area of computational biology used for finding out information about genes. The Human Genome Sequence Project is an attempt to determine exactly the correct sequence of all of the human DNA sequences. These are made up of amino acids A (Adenine), C (Cytosine), T (Thymine), and G (Guanine). She also pointed out during the interview that "people feel that once they know what the genes are in DNA, that would give them a big step in understanding and curing disease(s)." For example, during our discussion I learned that it might be possible to cure sickle cell anaemia by correcting the gene that causes the red blood cell to sickle. Dr Hunt and other scientists have developed a method of using sequence statistics to build a Markov decision model that is being used to solve a particular linear programming problem related to the alignment of sequences of DNA.

10. Hunt talks about her research.

My research has largely been in the application of ideas from Monte Carlo simulation and the dynamics of finite Markov chains. Some surprises along the way? Early in my career I worked on models in population genetics. After reading a theory about population cycles in voles due to changes in their genotype (not predator-prey interaction), I wrote up a model and published a paper showing how this could occur. To this day, I have never seen a vole a small rodent, although, I've tried to. Some years later, I arrived at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and attended a technical talk on (of all things) paint given by a non-mathematician, non-statistician industrial chemist. It was an extremely entertaining and informative exposition of randomness (as opposed to uniformity) with jars of jelly beans and Bingo cards illustrating ideas. This led to a rather unusual collaboration with a group that included engineers, computer scientists and a former artist.

11. Mathematics gives you the opportunity to create.

I think of myself as your average Jane and the fact that I can discover these connections - every now and again! - gives me a great deal of satisfaction. It means I'm participating in something that's at the root of the universe. Mathematics gives you the opportunity to create.

Michael Khoury explained some of Hunt's achievements.

A notable example is her work with physicist Robert McMichael on modelling the Barkhausen effect. The Barkhausen effect, or "Barkhausen noise," is a phenomenon in which the magnetic output of a metallic object has a jumpy, erratic response to a change in magnetic force (the term "noise" is appropriate, since these erratic jumps can be amplified and heard on a loudspeaker as a static-like click pattern). Using sophisticated mathematical tools, Fern Hunt developed a new, much more accurate statistical model of the phenomenon; the new model was able to explain subtle, experimental observations that the previous model could not. A better understanding of this effect has wide practical applications to all the ferromagnetic data storage devices in society, including disk drives and the magnetic stripe on credit cards.
Another important set of projects for Hunt deals with paints and other surface coverings. She studies paints and other such materials at a microstructural level, both measuring and modelling properties such as light-scattering behaviour. One innovation of her research program is the use of computer-rendering software to understand and control much more closely how materials will actually appear to the human eye "in real life." Research of this kind is expected to lead to improvements in the materials used by industry.

In addition to the applied research problems arising from the National Institute of Standards and Technology projects, Fern Hunt actively studies ergodic theory and dynamical systems. She has expressed the belief that some mathematical research for its own sake, not directly connected to a current project, is very important - it serves to stimulate creativity and to strengthen one's command of mathematical ideas. This belief is especially important for an applied mathematician such as Hunt, whose National Institute of Standards and Technology projects require the use of mathematical ideas from very diverse and unpredictable parts of mathematics.

Ergodic theory, Fern Hunt's primary area of theoretical mathematical research, is the study of how certain types of systems evolve over time. A simple ergodic system is the circumference of a circle that is being rotated in increments of one radian; if one follows the trajectory of any single point over time, it will eventually come arbitrarily close to every point on the circle. Ergodic theory turns out to have deep connections to geodesic flow, number theory, representation theory, harmonic analysis, and probability theory. The connection to probability theory, in fact, is through Markov chains, a mathematical tool that Fern Hunt has used frequently in her research, such as her improvements to existing models of the Barkhausen effect. This research area is closely related to the mathematics of chaos and fractals.

12. The future of mathematics in industry.

The use of mathematics - both applied and pure (core) - will continue to spread to areas that have not been thought of as quantitative. We already see this happening in biology and biomedical sciences, psychology and economics. Mathematics affects people's lives mainly as the backbone of computer algorithms implemented in the software we use everyday. Machine learning, an area of current intense academic and industrial research, has and will continue to greatly accelerate the automation process. This will affect how we do our jobs and what jobs are available in the future. We are in the midst of very large scale environmental change. Applications of mathematics that can help meet the challenges posed by this change is sorely needed.

13. What next for mathematics?

There is a dire need for explanations of how mathematics is used and what the public policy implications of mathematics research are. They must be accessible yet truthful and aimed at the general public. The goal of such work besides educating and informing is to engender intelligent public discussion. In this time of pandemic and epistemic collapse, this will be an extremely important but necessary undertaking.

It must also be clear by now that the days when we (with a few exceptions) could be oblivious to the societal and policy implications of mathematics research are over. While too many of us were not looking, pockets of racial and anti-feminist resentment in the last few years have grown to a size and malevolence that shocks even the most cynical of us. Perhaps these words are hard to read but if that is so, I would ask you to ponder the rhetoric of your family, friends, and politicians in the last few years. Ironically, we are approaching the point where there cannot be progress in the support and appreciation of science and mathematics without the commitment to the racial and gender diversity of the scientists and mathematicians who create it. My first hope for the future is that we will redouble our efforts to confront the attitudes and practices in our community that subtly and effectively promote bias. Secondly, I hope we can find ways to support and reward the work of mathematicians who are applying mathematics to the study of policies that will address foundational assumptions that sustain inequality. Even if everyone's work does not directly touch on these issues there is a role for all of us in this effort.

Last Updated December 2025