Something about this article bothered me, and I just pinned it down.
Taminia: When they see the pictures in our book lots of people want to have models themselves. I've made them for mathematics departments all over the world. There is one in the Smithsonian in the American Mathematical Model Collection. But they take a long time to make, and it's tough on your hands because you have to hold the wool very tightly to get a good stiff tension with the crochet. These days people have to want one very badly and keep on calling me, then maybe I will make them one.
What the hell is wrong with this woman? I crochet, and there's nothing particularly arcane about those models -- anyone who could crochet at all (a skill which can be picked up in about 20 minutes by a chimpanzee) could duplicate them with a pattern. Presumably the math going into the pattern is difficult, but the crochet is easy (although, as she says, laborious. They would take quite a while to do, but anyone could do it.) She's a goddam mathematician, and she's spending hours and hours of her life doing the monkey-work of crocheting these things for other math departments rather than telling them "here's the pattern -- find someone who can crochet or invest an hour of your own time learning how"?
I generally try to avoid blaming apparently sexually discriminatory outcomes on women's fucked-up socialization, but this is ludicrous. If someone from another math department called her repeatedly and asked her to come by and make them all lunch, because no one there could figure out how to cook a meal, would she do that too? (I do recognize that to some extent, she might be crocheting for fun, but from the quote, I don't think that's what's happening -- it's not that she's making these things to amuse herself and sending them out where they'll be useful. The pictures show things that would involve an awful lot of boring, stupid crochet without any of the tricky stitches that make it fun.)
If I knew her personally, I'd want to shake her. Pretty much, I do anyway.
To her credit, there wasn't a working model of the hyperbolic plane until she took needle to thread or however you crochet. So maybe with every pseudosphere she's reliving the glory days.
All kudos to her for the design, but she's doesn't sound like she's reliving the glory days, she sounds like she's bitching about the tedium of making the blasted things, but does it anyway if people beg hard enough. If it's a hassle, don't do it -- hand out a pattern. It is not the job of a mathematican to do timeconsuming manual labor that a trained orangutang could do just as well for other math departments. If it's not a hassle, and she's making them because she likes to, she shouldn't bitch about it.