As it turned out, my questions were not at all agreeable to my interviewees, who were concerned with the pressing and immediate problem of how to achieve equal rights for women in the mathematical field. The two questions suggested by my historian friend were either brushed off entirely or answered in a way that I was not looking for. It was the breath of life to her-similar to what it is for many men. Closer to what I had in mind by way of a response was the hope expressed by one interviewee that women are better communicators than men and that they will change our ideas as to what is mathematically respectable. As mentioned earlier, I had been thinking in large time units.
History shows that over the centuries the character of mathematics has changed considerably.
Changes experienced in recent centuries include the drive toward an unattainable absolute rigor, the drive toward increased abstraction, the development of logic and the total identification of mathematics with logic, not to mention the hundreds of special topics that have been born even as many others have died. I was familiar with. Perhaps I was extrapolating linearly from the common perception, backed up by some stats, that young, native-born American men are not opting for science and mathematics. These subjects are hard work, and there is not nearly enough money in them. The approach of the millennium has elicited considerable speculation as to what the mathematics of the future might look like.