Purple Martins and Purple Martin House

 

 

 

Purple Martins, 9.25" x 12.5", linocut by Ele Willoughby 2021

Inspired by some commissions I have been making a series of prints, while working on longer term projects lately. Here's one about purple martins!

The male birds are a glossy blue-black and the female birds are brown with a blue patch on their heads. They are acrobatic birds, and the largest North American birds in the swallow family. They are are considered synanthropic; they have developped a relationship with humans after living near people for centuries. In Eastern North America nest almost exclusively in birdhouses, like the one shown. They are dependant on human-provided nesting sites. Their relationship with people predates colonial times; Indigenous peoples, including Cherokee, Chickasaw and Choctaw people, hung gourds to attrack the insectivorous nesting purple martins, who in turn controlled insect populations. In western North America, they still nest in holes made by woodpecks and other natural cavities. The roost together in huge numbers in late summer. These linocuts are printed by hand on Japanese kozo, or mulberry, washi paper. The male is in blue and black, the female in shades of brown with blue on the head and the house is in purple. Each sheet is 12.5" tall by 9.25" wide (31.7 cm by 23.5 cm).

Mathematician Karen Uhlenbeck, Bubbles and Bubbling

Karen Keskulla Uhlenbeck, linocut detail, 9.25" x 12.5", variable edition on Japanese kozo paper with chine collé with suminagashi marbling, by Ele Willoughby, 2021

My latest #sciart (or, maybe #mathart) portrait is of mathematician Karen Uhlenbeck. Though a lot of her work is pertinent to physics, this was still a challenge to work out how to tell the story of her mathematics. A founder of modern geometric analysis, she won the 2019 Abel Prize for "her pioneering achievements in geometric partial differential equations, gauge theory, and integrable systems, and for the fundamental impact of her work on analysis, geometry and mathematical physics." Partial differential equations are pretty central to doing physics, and a sort of mathematics I really enjoy, but apart from that, I know what all the words mean in that previous sentence, but things like gauge theory and analysis aren't part of the math I've studied or used in my own research. As we move forward in time, depicting contemporary (or near contemporary) mathematics is increasingly challenging because it's beyond my ken.

I looked up several of her important papers, seeking geometrical diagrams as a way to tell the story of her research pictorially. Though she describes herself as a visual, geometric (and messy!) thinker, I didn't find anything but a lot of algebra (which I would have had to work hard to follow, let alone use to speak to a wide audience, or painstakingly carve in reverse!) But I found an "in" for depicting minimal surfaces and her methods for removing singularities, through Fields Medalist Sir Simon Donaldson's review of her work, including a schematic of "bubbling" and also some of the great science/math communication and articles about her and her work, which were published when she won the Abel Prize.

Born in Clevland to an engineer father Arnold Keskulla and teacher and artist mother Carolyn Windeler Keskulla, her family moved to New Jersey when she was a child. She spent her childhood enjoying nature, playing football and secretly reading science texts, imagining a job where she could avoid people. She started a degree in physics but switched to math at the University of Michigan. In the wake of the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik the US Congress passed the National Defense Education Act, to encourage more participation in STEM including encouraging women and minorities in those fields. The university added an honours math course in response, which showed her there was more to math than she ever knew and it changed her life. “The structure, elegance and beauty of mathematics struck me immediately, and I lost my heart to it,” she wrote. She switched majors. She chose the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University, for graduate school, avoiding applying to more prestigious schools where she feared the competitive male math culture wouldn't suit her. She married biophysicist Olke C. Uhlenbeck, the son of European intellectuals; his father is well-known physicist George Uhlenbeck. She was quite influenced by her new in-laws. Her parents valued ideas but put an emphasis on earning an income, but her in-laws valued intellectual things and encouraged her pursuit of mathematics. Her husband moved to Harvard and she opted to switch to graduate school at Brandeis University, where she earned her PhD in 1968 with advisor Richard Palais. Palais was exploring the space between analysis (a generalization of calculus) and topology (the study of shapes) and Uhlenbeck enjoyed this in-between world. With Smale, Palais had made advances in the study of harmonic maps, which came out of the calculus of variations and the search for shapes in equilibrium with physical measurements. Uhlenbeck's research built on this.

She found temporary jobs at MIT and Berkeley but was hampered by the classic "two-body problem" for academic spouses (where an couple cannot find two professorships in the same place) and anti-nepotism rules - though she later noted that the institutions which claimed they were precluded from hiring both her and her husband, even in different departments, did not officially have any such anti-nepotism rules on the books. Schools like MIT, Stanford and Princeton which courted her husband, simply declined to hire a woman in math. Her husband generously declined to work at institutions where she could not.

Eventually they both got faculty positions at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1971. But she could not stand life in Urbana, where she was often dismissed as an "academic wife" rather than a professor in her own right. She lacked professional support, did not enjoy teaching, felt undervalued and struggled to find the right research topic for her. But, while there, she met post-doc Jonathan Sacks and they began working whether certain problems converge to harmonic maps; eventually they discovered a sort of "awkward point" or singularity called a bubble where systems cannot converge on a harmonic map. The mathematical concept of a minimal surface minimizes area (or surface tension or energy) the way a soap bubble does in the natural world. They showed there were a finite number of these singularities and that when you rescale a map near them you have "bubbling" as in the diagram in my print. This trick of rescaling was one of her and Sacks' most important contributions.

 She moved to the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1976, separating from her husband. In 1983, she moved to the University of Chicago, where there were other women math professors and peers who took her seriously. She received a Sloan Fellowship and finally knew she could support herself and her research. She learned the value of a professional support network and realized that isolating herself was hurting her and her career. Her work with Sacks was foundational to the development of the new mathematical field of geometrical analysis. This bubbling phenomenon was found in many different sorts of mathematical physics. She took her intuition and techniques honed working on minimal surfaces and began ground-breaking work in gauge theory and the nature of exotic n-spaces, a means of connecting observations at different places that comes up in the quantum mechanical world of fundamental forces, building on the work of mathematical physicists like Weyl, Yang and Mills. With C.H. Taubes, she analyzed Yang-Mills equations in four dimensions; she proved her removable singularities theorem, showing that bubbling cannot occur around isolated points, so if a finite-energy solution exists to the Yang-Mills equations near a point, the solution will extend smoothly to the point. Simon Donaldson's extension of this research won him the prestigious Fields Medal for mathematics in 1986. Uhlenberck won a MacArthur Prize Fellowship or "genius grant" (1983-1988) which made her feel, "obliged to become more ambitious.”

She married mathematician Robert F. Williams, then in 1988, moved to the University of Austin as the Sid W. Richardson Foundation Regents Chairholder and won the Noether Lecture award from the Association for Women in Mathematics. In 1990, she was only the second woman in math to give the plenary lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Kyoto, after none other than mathematical giant Emmy Noether. She founded the Park City Mathematics institute and with Chuu-Lian Terng she co-founded the IAS Women and Mathematics (WAM) program to recruit and retain more women in math, encouraging collaboration and mentorship at all stages of their careers, a complete turn-around from the isolation she sought at the beginning of her career and her avoidance of her fellow women in math because “It was self-evident that you wouldn't get ahead in mathematics if you hung around with women.” Together, they've created a network of nearly 1500 women mathematicians. She realized that one needs role models - not examples of perfection, but people who make errors but pick themselves back up. When asked if she had a role model, she cited beloved chef and TV presenter Julia Child! "She had these fantastic television programs, and she was a real person. She could pick the turkey up off the floor and serve it," Uhlenbeck said. She founded the Distinguished Women in Mathematics Lecture Series at the University of Texas at Austin. Uhlenbeck won the National Medal of Science in 2001 and the 2007 Steele Prize for a Seminal Contribution to Mathematical Research from the American Mathematical Society. Granted yearly by the King of Norway, rather like a math equivalent to the Nobel, the Abel Prize includes a $700,000 award, and recognizes a mathematician’s entire career. Uhlenbeck became the first (and so far only) woman to win the Abel Prize in 2019.  She donated half the funds to organizations encouraging underrepresented (that is, traditionally excluded) minorities in mathematics. She further donated to environmental organizations and the National Academy of Science. She is now an emeritus professor at Austin, as well as a visiting associate at the Institute for Advanced Study and senior research scholar at Princeton University.

Like so many of my subjects, I've found she also loves art and began drawing more than a decade ago, mostly landscapes. She notes, “I discovered the fascinating fact that the problem of scale occurs both in mathematics and in drawing.” In drawing you want to capture the full forest as well as the details of individual plants, just as you want to capture all scales in math. “The hardest part with both is fitting the two scales together. You need the right tools.” Uhlenbeck has provided the world of mathematics and physics with so many of just the right tools.

References

Donaldson, S.. “Karen Uhlenbeck and the Calculus of Variations.” Notices of the American Mathematical Society 66 (2019): 1. DOI:10.1090/noti1806

Sioban Roberts, "In Bubbles, Karen Uhlenbeck Sees a Mathematical Universe," The New York Times, April 8, 2019

Karen Uhlenbeck, Wikipedia, accessed July 2021.

Rachel Crowell, "Karen Uhlenbeck Becomes First Woman To Win Abel Prize For Mathematics," Forbes, March 20, 2019

Dale DeBakcsy, How Mathematical Lone Wolf Karen Uhlenbeck Found Her Pack, Women You Should Know, November 29, 2017.

Karen Uhlenbeck, Karen Uhlenbeck on Being the First Woman to Receive the Abel Prize, remarks made at reception at the Institute for Advanced Study on March 19, 2019.

Karen Uhlenbeck, Coming to grips with success: a profile of Karen Uhlenbeck, Celebratio Mathematica, 1996

Jessica Atlee, Crossing Fields: Karen Uhlenbeck’s pioneering work marries math with physics, Symmetry Magazine, August 15, 2019.

Erica Karreich, Karen Uhlenbeck, Uniter of Geometry and Analysis, Wins Abel Prize, Quanta Magazine, March 19, 2019

Marianne Freiberger, The Abel Prize 2019, Plus magazine, University of Cambridge, March 19, 2019.

Lyell's Amphibious Being

 

Lyell's Amphibious Being, linocut, 10" x 8" by Ele Willoughby

So here's my latest Imaginary Friend of Science: Lyell's Amphibious Being. Dressed like geologist Charles Lyell himself, with sample bag, geological hammer, pick axe and magnifying glass, in front of the geological cross-section from the end papers of Lyell's 'Principles of Geology' and a couple of fossils from terrestrial and marine life (fern and nautiloid respectively). It's a two block linocut on Japanese kozo (or mulberry) paper, 10" x 8" and available here. Read more about the Amphibious Beast in the Imaginary Friend of Geology.

Wiwaxia Hat

 

Wiwaxia, a scaly spiny invertebrate were common inhabitants of the Cambrian & early Ordovician seas. No one is quite sure if they were scaly worms or mollusks, but I was quite sure if you scaled up (no pun intended!) their 5 cm long bodies they would make quite a fabulous hat. One of the fun things about contemplating ancient fossil is that colour is rarely preserved so no one can disprove my (admittedly quite unlikely) idea that the scales has multifarious patterns. So this piece is really wearable multimedia textile art. It works sculpture or hat.

When I make art to tell stories about science I am often literal and direct to communicate clearly. If I make art for or about me, it’s much more metaphorical. Though depicting an extinct animal might easily be #SciArt, this is more about my feelings of experiencing lockdown. I can’t quite explain why I felt like “f— it, I’m making a wiwaxia hat” is how I felt, but it was. This was work I could actually do while wrangling my child for remote school, when very few other things were possible. Each scale and spine is block printed and hand sewn.

 

Carving, while working at the same table as a busy 7 year old was tricky. I felt like I said, "Don't shake the table" incessantly. Printing while supervising school would not work at all. But, I could cut and sew by hand,  hand-printed scales and spines I prepared the previous evening (after my son's bedtime).

Compare this work with my print on the same subject:

Wiwaxia linocut by Ele Willoughby, 11" x 14" on translucent washi with bark inclusions and collaged assorted washi scales and spines.

Thanks to my husband Roger Hallett for the photos!
 

 

Imaginary Friends of Geology

Charles Lyell, by Alexander Craig in 1840 when Lyell was 43 years old.

I’m always on the lookout for new “imaginary friends of science” and periodically I ask for suggestions. My series is made of the charismatic metaphors and thought experiments through the history of science. “Imaginary friend” is a bit tongue-in-cheek but my series includes Schrödinger’s cat, Maxwell’s Demon, Laplace’s Demon, Descartes’ Demon, Russell’s Teapot, Occam’s Razor, the Spherical Cow and Hilbert’s Grand Hotel. My series is skewed towards physics (with some math and philosophy) because that’s my background. I ask for suggestions and biologists just look quizzical but I suspect other fields do this too. It's not an obvious thing to research since this is not really a recognized category of metaphor/thought-experiment, and I coined the term "imaginary friend of science" but you sort of know one when you meet them. Tell me your favourites!

Recently I got a suggestion from geology for my ‘imaginary friends of science’ series (hat tip to Greg Priest). This imaginary friend is a bit obscure but fits perfectly. Early geologist Charles Lyell (1797-1875), in his famous ‘Principles of Geology’ wrote that to avoid some sources of prejudice in understanding geology would require an Amphibious Being, who could, say, compare processes happening today on land and those happening today below water with what we see in the geological record. Likewise the Amphibious Being would be better able to identify fossils, being familiar with life on land and in the sea. He wrote,

It should, therefore, be remembered, that the task imposed on those who study the earth's history requires no ordinary share of discretion; for we are precluded from collating the corresponding parts of the system of things as it exists now, and as it existed at former periods. If we were inhabitants of another element—if the great ocean were our domain, instead of the narrow limits of the land, our difficulties would be considerably lessened; while, on the other hand, there can be little doubt, although the reader may, perhaps, smile at the bare suggestion of such an idea, that an amphibious being, who should possess our faculties, would still more easily arrive at sound theoretical opinions in geology, since he might behold, on the one hand, the decomposition of rocks in the atmosphere, or the transportation of matter by running water; and, on the other, examine the deposition of sediment in the sea, and the imbedding of animal and vegetable remains in new strata. He might ascertain, by direct observation, the action of a mountain torrent, as well as of a marine current; might compare the products of volcanoes poured out upon the land with those ejected beneath the waters; and might mark, on the one hand, the growth of the forest, and, on the other, that of the coral reef. 

-Charles Lyell, 'Principles of Geology' 9th ed. 1853

James Hutton during fieldwork, by John Kay

He actually goes on to further propose other biases could be avoided only if one could live also in the subterranean world, and hence, a further imaginary friend, "some "dusky melancholy sprite," like Umbriel, who could "flit on sooty pinions to the central earth," but who was never permitted to "sully the fair face of light," and emerge into the regions of water and of air" but such a sprite would have biases due to his lack of access to life on land or in the sea! Here I'm just going to consider the Amphibious Being. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Geologist - Carl Spitzweg, circa 1860

While far less well-known than say, Maxwell's Demon or Schroedinger's Cat, the Amphibious Being absolutely performs the same purpose. He's a figment of Lyell's imagination who serves to elucidate and explore a problem in science. The Amphibious Being highlights the possibility that our conclusions about the origins of rocks or fossils  are biased since we only live on land, the same way Maxwell's Demon explores the mysterious nature of the Second Law of Thermodynamics or Schroedinger's Cat exposes the strangeness of the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics and what that would mean if we saw it in the every day world of large things like well, cats, rather than the subatomic scale. So I plan to add the Amphibious Being to my collection.

Rise of Mr. de Saussure to the summit of Mont Blanc, aquarellée engraving of Christian of Mechel (1737- 1817).

Professor Owen, by Frederick Watty in Cartoon Portraits and Biographical Sketches of Men of the Day (1873)

My question is, what would such an Amphibious Being look like? I made my Demons (Maxwell's, Laplace's and Descartes') ressemble those who introduced them with some additional features like horns. There are a lot of images of Lyell at various ages. He is always wearing a suit, with a magnifying glass or monocle on a chain around his neck.  There are sadly no images of him in the field. I tried to find some images of early geologists or Victorian geologists in particular. It's easy to find depictions of James Hutton (1726-1797) in the field, but not Lyell. Even searching for Victorian geologists in general proved hard. The vast majority of paintings or later photographs show middle class men in suits at home. There are some hilariously heroic posed images of geologists with hammers looking like Classical heroes. I was pleased so see images of Mary Anning, Alice Wilson and other trail-blazing women in geology come up in my search. The Rise of Mr. de Saussure to the summit of Mont Blanc, an aquarellée engraving of Christian of Mechel (1737- 1817), shows that geologists of Lyell's time did in fact where suits in the field, and some of the simple tools they employed: walking sticks, rakes, shovels and packs of supplies. There are also a number of photographs of somewhat scruffier Gold Rush geologists in California or the Yukon. Along with simple tools, geological hammers, magnifying glasses, and collecting bags are common. I wondered also about Victorian caricatures? I have seen cariactures of various well-known historical scientists (even if scientists seem to rarely be the sort of recognizable public figure to appear in cartoons today). So I looked up cariatures of Charles Lyell and was not disappointed.

'Awful Changes' - Caricature of Charles Lyell as Prof. Ichthyosaurus, by geologist Henry De la Beche (1796 -1855) on the pages of Francis Trevelyan Buckland (Son of William B.). "Curiosities of Natural History".

 

David Bressan points out in the History of Geology blog, how some of Charles Lyell's off-base ideas were skewered by contemporaries. He denied that extiction was possible which lead him to an idea of cyclic time. He wrote:

 
"Then might those genera of animals return, of which the memorials are preserved in the ancient rocks of our continents. The huge iguanodon might reappear in the woods, and the ichthyosaur in the sea, while the pterodactyl might flit again through the umbrageous groves of tree ferns." 

The very year Lyell first published 'Principles of Geology,' geologist Henry de la Beche ridiculing the thought that dinosaurs might return published a famous cariature of Lyell as a future post-climate change 'Professor Ichthyosaurus' lecturing his reptilian students about "some of the lower order of animals; the teeth are very insignificant, the power of the jaws trifling," namely, the no longer dominant mammals.

Ichthyosaurus caricature published in 1885 in the Punch magazine. The discovery of ichthyosaurus fossils lead to interest in reportings of sea monsters, including for Charles Lyell who wanted to support his idea that animals did not become extict, only rare. He wisely did not include this idea in his geology textbook. (via History of Geology)

The Professor Ichthyosaurus, though an actual, contemporary and amusing cariature of Lyell as a being, which in the cartoon at least, appears amphibious, isn't quite what I want. The itchyosaurus was a marine reptile, not an amphibian. The lecture setting does not suggest fieldwork, nor any greater insight into geology because of its amphibious nature. 

Henry de la Beche, incidentally, famously painted the first paleoart scene, Duria Antiquior, based largely on his friend Mary Anning's findings and he sold lithographic prints of his painting to raise funds to help support her. I thought of him as more modern and kind, in his loyalty and friendship with Mary Anning, a paleontologist who was largely excluded due to her sex, class and religion. But in researching this my opinion of him fell. While he understood slavery was an abomination, since his own income depended on an enheirtance of a sugar plantation in Jamaica worked by enslaved people, he (guiltily) opposed abolition in favour of in favour of gradual change. 'This is wrong but let's not be too hasty' is not an ethical stance.

Duria Antiquior – A more Ancient Dorset is a watercolour painted in 1830 by the geologist Henry De la Beche

And what about the all-important "amphibious" part of my Amphibious Being? My first thought was salmanders. I love the look of gill-stalks and perhaps they suggested Lyell's substantial sideburns. I find the axolotl looks quite anthropomorphic as it is (as reflected in Julio Cortazar's short story, Axolotl).  The axolotl is of course limited in range to Mexico, and though other salamanders go through a larval stage with gill-stalks, this didn't feel quite right or in any way an allusion to Lyell. My next thought was to look at Victorian cariatures of anthropomorphic frogs, which (for reasons I don't entirely understand) was very much a thing. Frog men cariatures and Christmas cards and other illustrations, sometimes to satirize society are pretty common, so I thought that was just the thing.

I am now sketching a Victorian frog-man geologist for my next Imaginary Friends of Science print!

Hilbert's Grand Hotel

 

Hilbert's Grand Hotel, 8" x 10", linocut by Ele Willoughby, 2021

My latest linocut print illustrates the paradox of Hilbert's Grand Hotel, a thought experiment conceived by the great mathematician David Hilbert (1862-1943) in 1924 to show the paradox of infinite sets. If you imagine a regular hotel with a finite number of rooms, if they are all filled you can't add more guests. In an imaginary infinite hotel however, guests are always welcome! Even if all the (conveniently numbered 1, 2, 3, ...) rooms are filled, you simply shuffle all the guests over one room and make room for the next guest. You can repeat this argument for one more guest, two more guests, three more guests, ...infinity more guest... infinity groups of infinite guests, etcetera!

The print shows a grand hotel on a steep angle (with a vanishing point at infinity of course), labelled "Hilbert's Grand Hotel" below a cameo of Hilbert himself, and the slogan "No vancancy. Check in now!" Above the hotel is a glowing infinity symbol. The size of countably infinite sets, like all natural numbers {1,2,3, .... ∞ } is denoted by Aleph Nought ℵ0 shown on the two flags.

Botanist E.K.Janaki Ammal

E.K. Janaki Ammal, linocut by Ele Willoughby, 9.25" x 12.5", 2021

Botanist Janaki Ammal (4 November 1897 – 7 February 1984), a trailblazer for women in science in India, worked on genetic crosses, breeding sweeter sugarcane varieties which could thrive in India, was an expert in cytogenetics and phytogeography and coauthor of the influential Chromosomal Atlas of Plants. The first woman in India to earn a doctorate and the first woman in the US to earn a doctorate in botany, she became an environmental activist and wrote about the importance of incorporating indigenous knowledge when working toward sustainable development. Her name lives on in the names of plants like the Magnolia kobus Janaki Ammal and the eggplant (known as brinjal or brengal in India) Janaki Brengal, and the recently developed delicate yellow rose named in her honour.

One of 13 siblings born to Dewan Bahadur E. K. Krishnan, a sub-judge in Madras Presidency who wrote books about local birds, and his second wife Devi Krishnan, in a blended family of 19 with 6 children from his first marriage, Janaki grew up in a home with many books on nature and wildlife. She was nonetheless born into the Thiyya caste, which was considered backwards, and this later affected her treatment as a scientist. She went to a missionary school in Tellichery before studying for her botany degree at Queen Mary College in Madras (now Chennai) and graduating with an Honours degree from Presidency College in 1921, where she developed a love of cytogenetics. She took a job teaching Women’s Christian College. Granted a prestigious Barbour Scholarship at the University of Michigan, she was able to avoid a marriage to a cousin, having watched so many sisters have arranged marriages, and come to the US for graduate school. Her niece recounted that she was detained at Ellis Island until she was mistaken for an Indian princess dressed in her traditional silks, with long dark hair, and she told her niece, “I did not deny it.” After her masters in 1925, she returned to teaching at the WCC, and then complete her doctorate as a Barbour Fellow in 1931, becoming the first woman in the US to earn a doctorate in botany. As a plant cytologist she focused on hybridization on plants, producing interspecific and intergeneric hybrids. Her thesis "Chromosome Studies in Nicandra Physaloides" saw her produce a triploid eggplant cross known as "Janaki Brengal."

She returned to India as a professor of botany at the Maharaja's College of Science, Trivandrum, from 1932 - 1934 before spending five years at the Imperial Sugar Cane Institute, Coimbatore along with Charles Alfred Barber, as a geneticist working to develop a sweeter sugarcane hybrid which could thrive in India and reduce their dependence on imports from Indonesia and grow more food domestically. She worked on the cytogenetics of Saccharum spontaneum, the sugarcane species grown in India, as well as developing hybrids with related grass species like zea, sorghum, and bamboo. She was elected Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences in 1935. Her cross-breeding research, using a labour intense process called polyploidy, provided the means for consistent results in hardy sugarcane with higher sucrose content. Her work on hybrid plants which could survive the tropical climate was important to India's recovery from famines (including the 1943 Bengal famine that claimed nearly 3 million lives).

Frustrated by discrimination she faced due to her sex, single status and her class, she moved to England in 1940 where she worked as Assistant Cytologist at the John Innes Horticultural Institution in London, throughout the Blitz, until 1945. For company, she smuggled a palm squirrel named Kapok in the folds of her sari, into the UK and it lived at the John Innes Horticultural Institution for many years! She met and worked with many celebrated geneticists (and eugenicists) there. She had been invited to work with famous geneticist Cyril Dean Darlington, and together wrote the monumental Chromosome Atlas of Cultivated Plants, which remains an important botany text on economic plants today. They took a different approach; rather than mapping the occurrence of plants of different classifications, their atlas recorded the chromosome numbers of 100,000 plants to show evolutionary patterns of botanical groups. She also published chromosonal counts, ploidy and on the origin and evolution of numerous garden species including grasses, Rhododendron and Nerines. S.D. Darlington and the renown J.B.S. Haldane (who coined the term ‘genetics’) remained friends and mentors throughout her career.

Then she worked as a cytologist at the Royal Horticultural Society at Wisley from 1945 to 1951; she was their first salaried female staff member. She researched the effects of the medication colchicine on woody plants like magnolia. When applied in water to the growing tip of young seedlings once their seed leaves had fully expanded it caused a doubling of chromosomes in cells, giving them heavier leaves, variable flowers with often thicker tepals which make them more durable. She planted many magnolia shrubs which still bloom every spring and a variety (with white petals and purple stamens) has been named Magnolia kobus Janaki Ammal after her.

After a chance meeting on a plane, none other than Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru lured her back to India post-Independence by personally requesting she return in 1951 to be Officer on Special Duty then later Director General of the Botanical Survey of India, which had been a colonial institution set up by Kew Gardens in 1890 to gather specimen (and export them to England). She found the colonialist European-biased tradition continued and she worked to have house Indian plant specimens in India. She wrote, “The plants collected in India during the last thirty years have been chiefly by foreign botanists and often sponsored by institutions outside India. They are now found in various gardens and herbaria in Europe, so that modern research on the flora of India can be conducted more intensely outside India than within this country.” She worked to document indigenous knowledge of plants and their cultural role. She argued that the way Chinese and Malayan flora mixed with Indian plants in north-east India led to natural hybridisation and resulted in great biodiversity. In 1956 the University of Michigan gave her an honorary LL.D. Nobel laureate C. V. Raman founded the Indian National Academy of Sciences and selected her as fellow in its first year in 1957.  She worked the rest of her career as a government scientist in various roles within India such as at Central Botanical Laboratory at Allahabad, as officer on special duty at the Regional Research Laboratory in Jammu, and at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre at Trombay before settling in Madras in 1970 as Emeritus Scientist at the Centre for Advanced Study in Botany, University of Madras. She lived and worked in their Field Laboratory at Maduravoyal near Madras for the rest of her life and made her own garden of medicinal plants. She was the first woman scientist to have the prestigious Padma Shri conferred on her by the Government of India in 1977. During her retirement years, she focused on researching and publishing on medicinal plants and ethnobotany, travelling the country and interacting with remote tribes and making tremendous contributions to research on Northeast and Himilayan flora.

Her focus shifted to protecting the environment and biodiversity for the future. The push for food cultivation was leaving to massive deforestation, including 25 million acres claimed by the government under the Grow More Food Campaign. She used her renown as a leading scientist to defend the rainforest in Kerala with the Save Silent Valley campaign when the government planned to flood 8.3 square kilometres for a hydroelectric project. At 80 years old she used all her prestige to protect this pristine rainforest and all the biodiversity it contains, as well as putting her expertise to work mounting a chromosonal survey of all the plants it contains. The campaign was successful and the area became instead a national park, after her death at age 87 in 1984.  

Born under British rule, to a caste deemed backwards, when only 1% of Indian women were literate, and less than 1000 advanced beyond 10th grade, Janaki Ammal rose to prominence as a scientist. She spent years working in scientific institutions which were otherwise white male enclaves. She lead an ascetic life of Ghandian simplicity, always dressed simply in saris, wishing to be remembered for her scientific work at the cutting edge of cytogenetics and cytogeography.  She was a trailblazer for applying indigenous knowledge in environmentalism. Her name lives on in plant varieties, and the Ministry of Environment and Forestry of the Government of India National Award of Taxonomy, and several scholarships but her work lives on in the great swathes of rainforest she helped preserve, the sweetness of Indian sugarcane hybrids, hardy magnolias still living in England and much more.

References

Janaki Ammal, wikipedia, accessed April, 2021 

Sharanya Dutta, Do You Know the Botanist Janaki Ammal, She of the Magnolia Kobus fame?, The Wire, October 21, 2016

Archana Nagarajan, Janaki Ammal, Sci-illustrate Stories, July 7, 2019.

Janaki Ammal Edvaleth Kakkat, University of Michigan Rackham Graduate School Barbour Scholars Spotlight, accessed May 2021.

Janaki Ammal, History of Scientific Women on scientificwomen.net, accessed May, 2021.

Vinita Damodaran, Janaki Ammal - My work is what will survive, PHYTOPIA Science Gallery Bengalaru on sciencegallery.com, accessed May, 2021. 

Leila McNeill, The Pioneering Female Botanist Who Sweetened a Nation and Saved a Valley, smithsonianmag.com, July 31, 2019.

Geeta Doctor, Celebrating Janaki Ammal, Botanist and a Passionate Wanderer of Many Worlds, The Wire, July 6, 2016

Mandeep Matharu, Yvette Harvey & Matthew Biggs. "My Work is What Will Survice". NatSCA blog. April 26, 2019.