Welcome to this week’s Math Munch!
What does a mathematician look like? What does a mathematician do? Here are a couple of things I ran across recently that give a window into what it’s like to be a professional research mathematician—someone who works on figuring out new math as their job.
Gary Davis, who blogs over at Republic of Mathematics, recently posted a short piece that challenges stereotypes about mathematicians. It’s called What does a mathematician look like?
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Who here is a mathematician? Click through to find out!
Gary’s point is that you can’t tell who is or isn’t a mathematician just by looking at them. Mathematicians come from every background and heritage. Gary followed up on this idea in another post where he highlighted some notable mathematicians who are black women. Here’s a website called Black Women in Mathematics that shares some biographies and history. And here’s a link to the Infinite Possibilities Conference, a yearly gathering “designed to promote, educate, encourage and support minority women interested in mathematics and statistics.” Suzanne Weekes, one of the five mathematicians pictured above, was a speaker at this conference in 2010.
Richard Tapia, another of the mathematicians above, is featured in the following video. His life story both inspires and delights.
And what does this diversity of mathematicians do all day? Well, one thing they do is talk to each other about math! And though there are many new technologies that help people to do and share and collaborate on mathematics (like blogs!), it’s hard to beat a handy chalkboard as a scribble pad for sharing ideas.
At Blackboard of the Day, Mathieu Rémy and Sylvain Lumbroso share the results of these impromptu math jam sessions. Every day they post a photograph of a blackboard covered in doodles and calculations and sketches of ideas. The website is in French, but the mathematical pictures are a universal language.
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Diana Davis, putting the finishing touches on a blackboard masterpiece
Sharing mathematical ideas can take many forms, and sometimes choosing the right medium can make all the difference. Mathematicians use pictures, words, symbols, sculptures, movies, songs—even dances! Let me point you to the “Dance your Ph.D.” Contest. It’s exactly what it sounds like—people sharing the ideas of their dissertations (their first big piece of original work) through dance. Entries come in from physicists, chemists, biologists, and more. Below you’ll find an entry by Diana Davis, a mathematician who completed her dissertation at Brown University this past spring. Diana often studies regular polgyons and especially ways of “dissecting” them—breaking them up into pieces in interesting ways.
Thanks to The Aperiodical—a great math blog—for sharing Diana’s wonderful video!
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Some pages from Diana’s notebooks
All kinds of mathematicians study math and share it in so many ways. It’s like a never-ending math buffet!
Bon appetit!
Math Munch 
DID IT FEEL GOOD WHEN YOU WERE A RACE R? I think that it’s nice that u would direct your students to go forward with their education like your mom did with you. Did math help you RACE or race better?
This video was very confusing to me. I understood what was going on in the beginning until the woman began to add people and to add more black lines. What was the purpose of adding the people and the black lines?
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