with permission from Lost Coast Outpost

Phyllis Zweig Chinn

“Are you prepared to be a role model?” the interviewer asked Phyllis Zweig Chinn when she interviewed 50 years ago for a position at what was then Humboldt State University. Little did he know that she would become a distinguished mathematician (shown in this photo at a convention she organized on graph theory/combinatorics.)

“I said, ‘Well, I am a female and, by virtue of that, I am certainly going to be a role model to women students, but I don’t have a chip on my shoulder about it,’” Chinn recalled. “Which was kind of true until I got here,” she added, laughing.

Servas members have known for many years that Phyllis Chinn is a special person (see Open Doors Volunteer Spotlight article), but we did not realize that our petite dynamo was an academic trailblazer on many levels. This article is an abstract from California's Humboldt County ezine "Lost Coast Outpost" article posted August 8, 2024, under the title: Arcata Mathematician/Accidental Radical Phyllis Zweig Chinn Reflects on a Lifetime of Teaching and Trailblazing. We appreciate the Outpost's permission to use their article. You can read the full story HERE.

Chinn became Humboldt’s first female math professor in fall 1975. When she started, women could be fired for getting pregnant. The Equal Credit Opportunity Act, which allowed women to open bank accounts or lines of credit without a male co-signer, had passed just one year prior. Yet over the next 35 years, from a home base in Arcata, Chinn would go on to publish over 60 “highly-cited” works and collaborate with some of the most renowned mathematicians of the time. She also served as Math Department chair.

After graduating in 1962, armed with a master’s in teaching from Harvard, she took the clearest path available to women in mathematics at the time: educating children. Chin quickly realized that the junior high classroom was not suited to her goals, and she quickly jumped on an opportunity to teach at the university level the following year.

Chinn and her husband Daryl at their wedding. 

Chin felt an unspoken sentiment among male colleagues that women were unsuited for the field but when she received promotions, “there were certainly some people who said quietly that they thought it was because I was a woman,” she said.

In response, Lee co-founded a student group called WINS (Women in Natural Resources and Sciences) providing opportunities for women studying math, engineering, nursing and science to learn from women working in the field. Later, Chinn worked to coordinate Expanding Your Horizons in Science and Math, which hosted annual conferences for girls grades 7-12.

Chinn remained the only tenure-track woman in the Math Department for more than a decade, publishing on graph theory and combinatorics with preeminent mathematicians worldwide. On the scale Erdős numbers, which denote the distance between Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős and another individual, as measured by academic papers, Chinn scores a one – meaning she published a paper with the distinguished Hungarian.

Chinn with mathematician Paul Erdős (left) and HSU President Alistair McCrone.

But teaching prospective teachers was always Chinn’s passion. Chinn also taught classes in women’s studies, education and teacher preparation, science, interdisciplinary studies and religious studies. She spent the majority of her career with her husband Daryl, who chaired a human relations committee at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Chinn retired from Humboldt University in 2010. Today, she volunteers with the international peace organization Servas United States and the Red Cross. She also participates in a local support group for Parkinson’s and national studies of the disease.

“I felt that if I am going to have Parkinson’s, at least I can do everything I am able to contribute to the science of understanding and treating it,” she said. To learn more about Chinn’s life, listen to an interview with her daughter, opera singer Hai-Ting Allison Chinn.  Here is a link to the interview at StoryCorps Archive.