Hidden Figures No Longer

For her sprawling new novel The Tenth Muse, Catherine Chung unearthed untold stories of great women in mathematics—and learned how to harness some of that empowerment for herself.

- David Canfield

WHEN CATHERINE CHUNG’S debut, Forgotten Country, was published in 2012, she started thinking about what it means to be a smart, ambitious woman in the world. “This article came out in the Smithsonian magazine about five famous women in mathematics. I’d never heard of any of them,” she says. “In the histories of math and science, women are often excluded.”