MAY 14 — Something I have noticed over the years of teaching mathematics at the foundation level is that some of my most careful, most persistent students are women. Not because I went looking for a pattern (I did not) but because it became hard to ignore. They check their working twice. They come to consultation hours with specific questions, not vague ones. When they get something wrong, they want to understand exactly where the reasoning broke down, not just copy the correct answer.
This is not a generalization about all students, or all women. It is simply what I have observed, in my own classroom, over time. And it made me think about what mathematics actually rewards, and whether we are communicating that clearly enough to the people who are already doing it well.
The qualities that lead to genuine mastery in mathematics are not speed or loudness. They are precision, the willingness to revisit assumptions, patience with a problem that does not open immediately, and the honesty to say "I do not understand this yet" rather than pretending otherwise. In my research in chaos theory and cryptography, these are the qualities that matter most.
A chaotic system does not yield to impatience. An encryption proof does not care how confident you sound; it either holds, or it does not. You have to be willing to sit with the problem, turn it over, and try again. These are qualities I see regularly in my students, and I see them often in women who are sometimes, quietly, not entirely sure they are supposed to be good at this.
What I try to do, practically, is make the classroom a place where working through something carefully is visibly valued, even more than arriving at the answer quickly. — Unsplash pic
I have had students: bright, capable students, who would solve a problem correctly, then lower their voice when they gave the answer, as if hedging against being wrong. This happened not because they were uncertain about the mathematics, but because somewhere along the way they had learned to be uncertain about themselves in a mathematics context.
What I try to do, practically, is make the classroom a place where working through something carefully is visibly valued, even more than arriving at the answer quickly. When a student explains her reasoning step by step, and the reasoning is sound, that matters more than whether she got there in two minutes or ten.
Over time, something shifts. The voice gets a little steadier. The answer comes without the hedge. That is not a special intervention; it is just good mathematics teaching. But it has a particular effect on students who came in believing, on some level, that confidence in mathematics was not available to them.
Supervising postgraduate students has given me a different vantage point. The women I have supervised in research, working on problems in cryptography, chaos synchronization, and secure communication, have shown me what it looks like when that early uncertainty is replaced by something more durable.
One of my students, working on secure healthcare data transmission, spent weeks on a proof that kept collapsing at the same point. She did not abandon the approach. She mapped out exactly where it was failing, went back to the foundational theory, and rebuilt from there. The paper was eventually published in a Scopus-indexed journal. That kind of persistence, the kind that does not require external validation at every step, is what research demands. And it is something that can be cultivated, in any student, if the environment makes it possible.
I did not set out to be a role model for women in mathematics. I set out to understand chaotic systems and build better cryptographic methods. The research is genuinely interesting to me: the kind of interesting that makes you stay with a problem longer than is probably sensible. But I have come to understand that doing the work visibly, and talking about it in plain language, matters beyond the research itself.
When I write about mathematics in the newspaper, or speak at a public forum about cryptography, I am also (without making it the point) showing that this kind of work is something a Malaysian woman does. Not as an exception, but just as a fact.
And perhaps that is the most honest thing I can offer to any young woman thinking about mathematics: not a grand statement about what she should do, but simply the evidence that it is being done carefully, seriously, and with genuine enjoyment.
* This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail.
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