Piper Harron

Piper H (Piper Harron) is a mathematician specializing in arithmetic statistics and algebraic number theory, and a blogger who writes about the oppressive and discriminatory culture in academia in the field of mathematics. Piper was a February 2021 honoree on Mathematically Gifted and Black. After postdoctoral research at the she began a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto.
Education and early life
Piper earned her bachelor's degree in Romance languages from New York University in 2002, and her masters degree in Mathematics (2009) and Ph.D. (January 2016) from Princeton University, where she was advised by Manjul Bhargava. She describes herself as having grown up in a predominately white neighborhood, attending predominately white schools.
Experiences with racism and misogyny
She left Princeton in 2009 due to an illness, and gave birth to her first child in 2011. In 2015 a Scientific American article described Piper as the way of the future, suggesting "mathematicians should think about how they want to explain mathematics and who they are inviting in or leaving out in the process." In a 2015 American Mathematics Society blog post, Piper's thesis was described as one of the best things to happen in 2015 "not because of the groundbreaking mathematics, but because it was an indicting commentary on the culture of mathematics and mathematicians. Harron’s thesis is a take-down of sorts, of the pervasive opacity and exclusivity of mathematics."
In 2017 she wrote a blog post for the American Mathematical Society, Get out of the Way calling on cis white male professors to resign from their positions, and make room for women of color and trans people. This blog post has received 91 comments and a discussion titled What do mathematicians think about Piper Harron's recent AMS article started on Quora, focusing on her suggestion that white male professors with tenure resign from their positions. In 2019 she wrote Diversity-22, a diversity statement, which illuminates the lack of diversity in mathematics departments, and describes her experiences pursuing a mathematics career as a "sequence of anecdotes on how to keep marginalized people out of math."
Awards and recognition
* PhD thesis received widespread media coverage: including The Hindu's thREAD Blog, Scientific American blog, and AMS blog’s “Best of 2015”
* Harron, P. (2016). The Equidistribution of Lattice Shapes of Rings of Integers of Cubic, Quartic, and Quintic Number Fields: An Artist’s Rendering.

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