Bonnie Shulman

2026 Sigma Xi Fellow

Biography

I didn’t start college until I was 30 and by then I was a single mother with a nine-year old daughter.  I graduated from Bronx High School of Science in 1968, The age of the Flower Child was in full bloom then, and I hitchhiked across the country, lived on a commune, and studied poetry with Allen Ginsberg in Boulder, Colorado. True to my activist roots, I also brought poetry into local schools and the Boulder County Jail.  

When I turned 30, I decided to listen to my elders who had been nagging me to go back to school for over a decade.  Mathematics and Physics were two subjects that I had always excelled at in high school, and so when I enrolled at the University of Colorado in 1981, that’s what I majored in, graduating with a PhD in Mathematical Physics ten years later.  Although my advisor urged me to take a job at a research university, my passion for teaching, and wide-ranging interests, led me accept a position at a liberal arts college in Maine.

My advisor is a theoretical astrophysicist.  We modeled wave propagation in inhomogeneous media, applying it to open questions about solar coronal loops. As a professor at Bates College for over two decades, my research interests also included history and philosophy of science, science technology and society (STS), feminist science studies, and mathematics education.  I published papers in all of these disciplines.  I consider myself an interdisciplinary scholar.

However interdisciplinarity was often viewed as a watered down version of scholarship and  I was criticized for this.  Many saw these diverse subjects to be a random collection of interests.  But to me they are all connected.  Both mathematics and poetry are symbolic languages used to capture the mystery and beauty of the world.  History and philosophy give context to science as a human endeavor.  STS embeds science in the society that supports it. Education is how we pass our passion and knowledge along. 

I brought all of my interests into the classroom.  The very first classes I designed and taught were a First Year Seminar “Calculus for the Queasy” and a modeling course.  The seminar involved lots of writing and the students in my modeling course kept journals with writing prompts that encouraged them to reflect on their learning process.  Although writing across the curriculum is now standard at many institutions, it was revolutionary at the time, and again, I was criticized for it.  

Later, working with a colleague in the Biology department, I co-created a course in Mathematical Biology, also a new endeavor at the time.  I advised theses of many students who wanted to explore “math and ….” topics.  I learned a lot about forestry, weaving patterns, the physics of musical instruments, and more.  But for me, the crown jewel of my teaching career was the course in Mathematics for a Just World, linking mathematics and social justice.  The combination of these two really had people scratching their heads!  I argued then, as I do now, that quantitative literacy is as important as reading literacy for an informed citizenry.  We studied the mathematics of gerrymandering, income inequality, environmental racism, and much more. 

Although I have often been an outlier as I pursued my interests, looking back on my career I am proud of what I did. It is a great honor to be recognized for these achievements.