Um, you make it sound a bit like being an academic is worth more than being a full-time mum. Maybe she just wanted that more than academic work. :-/

I feel that some of the background is a bit of a mystery, not entirely fleshed out, whether that's deliberate (more to be revealed), or not (not necessary for the plot).   It does look as if Mrs Holmes gave up academia for childcare, but there are sometimes hints that Mycroft was almost more involved in bringing up and educating Sherlock than she was.  And it's Mycroft that Sherlock looks to.   Genius Mrs Holmes doesn't feature in his mind palace at all.

I get the impression that the Holmes have money, so Mrs Holmes maybe didn't have to work to support the family and preferred not to.  And if they had money, if she'd wanted to work, she could have employed nannies. 

Getting a maths degree wouldn't necessarily have been particularly hard work (compared to other degrees!) if she was a genius mathematician.  It might even have been easy.   But maybe she just lost interest.  I remember reading an interview with a mathematician once, and he said something like he liked having done maths rather than doing it, which surprised me.  But maybe it can lose its appeal over the years.

I suppose her being a mathematician is also a reference to Moriarty in the books.  I'm not sure if it's just a reference or a plot point!

We have discussed this before but since I just saw this pic from the prop exhibition at Sherlocked: 

- Why is Ms Holmes introduced as a mathematician when she wrote a book that belongs definitely to the field of physics? 
- Why the American spelling "behavior" instead of "behaviour"?
- Why was the book discussing the thyroid gland (as can be seen from the page Mary is studying)?

Nothing about this makes any sense. 

I beg to differ. We have a British show, decorated by British set designers and written by British scriptwriters. Why should they use the American spelling? And why call someone a mathematician and in the very same scene use a physics book with medical content? This is not a prop that was just lying around, it has been created for the show. 

 It has become a default answer to explain everything that does not make sense with sloppiness. 

 

Last edited by SusiGo (November 28, 2017 4:16 pm)

SusiGo wrote:

I beg to differ. We have a British show, decorated by British set designers and written by British scriptwriters. Why should they use the American spelling? And why call someone a mathematician and in the very same scene use a physics book with medical content? This is not a prop that was just lying around, it has been created for the show. 

 It has become a default answer to explain everything that does not make sense with sloppiness. 

 

And only certain parts of fandom try to find a deeper meaning behind every "mistake".

The show needed a book written by Mrs. Holmes - somebody created a cover and put it on a book dealing with (amongst other things) the thyroid gland, because that was what was at hand (and who would ever notice?).

The spelling of behavio(u)r could be due to the fact that the show is created for an American/international audience (that's the only reason I can see for all those handguns whose illegality is never mentioned). Or mabybe the cover was created by an American - there might be working some in British TV. Or maybe the person who typed it was British but believes that British spelling should be simplified. Or he or she simply made a mistake. Either way, there was no time and money to redo it.

Being neither a mathematician nor a physicist, I can't say how hard and fast the border between both fields is - but given that I know of one mathematicians who built a speech encryption machine and another who got a nobel prize for economics I wouldn't be all that surprised if a mathematician wrote a book about the dynamics of combustion.

Kittyhawk wrote:

The show needed a book written by Mrs. Holmes - somebody created a cover and put it on a book dealing with (amongst other things) the thyroid gland, because that was what was at hand (and who would ever notice?).

That´s probably how it was done. They maybe took a real cover from some university primer, pasted the name M. L. Holmes on it and planted some medical book inside.
 

I think they were especially careful about sets that were the crucial points of some scenes (the bed in ASIP and Ben falling in HLV are good examples) - but they were quite careless about other things appearing in the story. Mycroft´s tie and Sherlock´s and John´s hair changing so radically between HLV and TST comes to mind.

This book was in the story for the fleeting moment only and proved quite unimportant for the storyline - so why waste the care of the crew on that if they have more important things to arraange?