Mathematics have been called many things. Among others, the queen of the sciences and the hand-maiden of the sciences. Therefore, while there seems to be some doubt regarding its precise social position, there is general agreement regarding its gender. In fact, all sciences probably look pretty feminine to the men who attend them: They obviously find the work desperately attractive, and the history of scientific investigation is full of evidence that she whom they court is changeable and capricious; in short, something of a hussy. Moreover, the way she responds to a push, or to guidance, is usually astonishing. She moves freely, but frequently in an unexpected direction. Time and again men have spent their lives trying to move her in a specified direction, quite without success. Viewed narrowly, their work would be classed as a failure. But, since science usually moves somewhere when pushed, these failures often are the bases of completely unexpected successes in other fields.