Aurélien Alvarez is a mathematician at the École Normale Supérieure of Lyon. His research interests include the theory of dynamical systems, in particular through the study of the topology and geometry of certain algebraic differential equations. Editor-in-chief of the online journal Images des mathématiques and co-author of the films Dimensions and Chaos, he is also interested in the continuing education of secondary school teachers and participates in numerous mediation activities, notably at the Maison des mathématiques et de l'informatique de Lyon.
Ayliean is a secondary Maths teacher and Maths communicator in Scotland working on outreach projects such as Simon Singh’s fantastic Parallel Maths Circle live streams. She has an extreme dislike of writing in the third person.
Hi, its me …. Ayliean, this feels a lot better!
Maths gets a bad rep, but there are actually millions of people out there who love it. I know this because I’ve somehow managed to gather 1.1 million likes on TikTok and all I post about is Maths.
I use fast paced videos on Youtube and TikTok to meet people where they are and spark an interest in Maths they may not know they have. I am incredibly honored to regularly feature on the popular channel Numberphile, although my main mission is to convert Numberphobes!
Growing up in a disadvantaged background and then working in underfunded schools I have met many people who fully believe that Maths is not a realm for them. I look for different ways of experiencing Maths such as art, sound, and touch to show people that thinking Mathematically can be an enjoyable activity.
I considered a long winded list of fancy projects, conferences, and talks I’ve done but really if you want to get a feel for who I am and what I do here are the three most important links:
- Why Maths Is The Best (in 140 seconds)
- University of Edinburgh Maths Week Scotland 2020 Plenary Talk
- Scottish Mathematical Council Journal 49 Pg29: Mental Health for Maths Teachers
Maria Dedò has carried out research first in algebraic topology and low dimensional topology and geometry, and later also in communication of mathematics in the Universities of Pisa, Cagliari and Milan, designing various exhibitions.
She retired in 2014 and, since then, she has worked on teacher training, both with online courses and an evolving website which collects meaningful problems with comments explicitly aiming to show why we think they are meaningful.
Cindy Lawrence is the Executive Director and CEO of the National Museum of Mathematics (MoMath)in New York. She began her career as a CPA, working in both public accounting and the private sector.Her career then segued into education as she became an instructor and editor for an international professional review program, writing and editing curriculum and reaching thousands of students worldwide. Ms. Lawrence also created and continues to direct an extracurricular mathematics program for gifted students, run through a joint venture with Brookhaven National Laboratory. In 2008, Ms. Lawrence began volunteering with a group that was determined to open North America’s only museum of mathematics. She quickly became an active contributor to the project, joining the exhibit design team and eventually becoming the Museum’s Chief of Operations. In January 2015, after having been promoted first to Associate Director and then to Co-Executive Director, Ms. Lawrence was named Executive Director and CEO of the National Museum of Mathematics (MoMath). Under the stewardship of Ms. Lawrence, MoMath, located in New York City, has attracted more than one million onsite visitors and engages audiences in 125 countries around the world. The innovative and engaging exhibits and programs developed by Ms. Lawrence and her team have resulted in numerous awards for MoMath, including the Communications Award for Public Outreach from the Joint Policy Board for Mathematics and the American Alliance of Museums Media and Technology Professional Network MUSE Award. In her day-to-day role, Ms. Lawrence focuses on the creative design process for exhibits and programs, as well as overseeing all aspects of operations. She serves as a consultant to people around the world aspiring to create math museums, and she has authored numerous articles about the role of mathematics in building community. Ms. Lawrence enjoys sharing the wonder and beauty of mathematics with audiences of all ages and backgrounds and demonstrating that math can be interactive, exciting, and fun.
Andreas Daniel Matt is the director of IMAGINARY, a Berlin-based nonprofit organisation for the communication of current research in mathematics. He has a PhD in Mathematics in the field of Machine Learning and worked from 2007 until 2016 for the Mathematisches Forschungsinstitut Oberwolfach, a Leibniz Institute, where he co-initiated IMAGINARY. In 2013 he received the Media Award of the German Society of Mathematics for his contribution to the communication of mathematics. In 2020 IMAGINARY was awarded the Mariano Gago Ecsite Award for Sustainable Success in Science Engagement.
Andreas did his first math exhibition in a shopping mall in Innsbruck in 2002 and since then has worked with a larger team and close collaboration with local organisers in more than 500 math engagement projects in 65 countries and 31 languages (https://about.imaginary.org/). He loves to design and create open-source engagement tools that enable all to play and experiment with, and to discover current mathematics. And he has a passion to motivate all to organize their own math exhibitions or to create their own math exhibits or new formats.
IMAGINARY is currently involved in a major international training and teaching program in AI and mathematics and has developed a new digital and physical open-source AI exhibition (www.i-am.ai) and a new exhibition on the connection between mathematics and music (https://lalalab.imaginary.org). Other current projects are an interactive picture book which combines storytelling and mathematics (https://hub.mathina.eu), a mobile mini museum on mathematical modelling for the climate crisis (http://climatecrisis.imaginary.org) and an exhibit on the future of mobility combining Lego tiles and a city simulation (https://futurium.de/en/future-mobility-simulator). IMAGINARY is also coordinating the website and communication for the UNESCO International Day of Mathematics, a project by the International Mathematical Union (www.idm314.org).
Olga Paris-Romaskevich is a CNRS researcher at the Institute of Mathematics in Marseille. Her research concerns the study of dynamical systems in relation with physics. In parallel to her research, she creates new forms of collaborative mediation of science in France with her association Mathématiques Vagabondes. She is a beginner filmmaker, now working on her first short documentary about girls and mathematics in France. She wants to construct her research and art in harmony with public engagement. Some of her projects include :
- 2015-16 a collaboration on a theater play Lettres de la quatrième dimension (Letters from the forth dimension) on life and work of Alicia Boole (based on writings by Moira Chas), with Marie Lhuissier and Valentin Seigneur
- 2014-16 a collaboration on Mathématiques du ciel (Mathematics of the sky), a website presenting celestial mechanics and mathematics of a 3-body problem to general public, with Marie Lhuissier and Valentin Seigneur
- 2018+ regular cinemaclub Cinémaths in Lyon reuniting science, art and society
- МАТЕМАТИКА — a blog full of stories and pictures about ten Russian female mathematicians, following the trip across Russia on train, collaboration with Bertrand Paris-Romaskevich
- 2021-23 an ongoing collaboration on a movie series by Denis van Waerbaeke called Voyages au pays des maths (Travels to the math’s country, in French)
- 2020+ an ongoing collaboration in organization of the girls-only one-week math school Cigales in Marseille and a sociology project (with Clémence Perronnet) around this school on access to mathematics and social and gender inequality.
Hugo Parlier and Paul Turner have worked together on outreach projects for the last ten years. Their first collaboration was Mathema, a book-app for iPad aimed at non-mathematicians, whose goal is to convey the true mathematical experience by engaging the reader in accessible but authentic mathematics. Using the experience gained from many Mathema-based workshops, they teamed up with the programming duo of Mario Gutiérrez and Reyna Juárez to create new platforms for interactive mathematical puzzles under the name Quadratis. So far the main outputs are science museum exhibit, called Exploratis, developed in conjunction with the Luxembourg Science Centre, and the puzzle app Quadratis.
Hugo is a professor at the University of Luxembourg and his research revolves around low dimensional manifolds and their moduli, in particular the study of surfaces and curves on surfaces. He very active in outreach activities and along with the Quadratis collaboration he is co-inventor of the recombination board game Involution - Revolution with Bruno Teheux. He led the team to showcase Exploratis and Involution - Revolution at the Luxembourg pavillon at World Expo Dubai.
Paul now divides his time between mathematics and art. He is a lecturer at the University of Geneva and visual artist with the Robert Turner Collective. His mathematical research is centred around the cohomology of sheaves on small categories and its relationship to Khovanov homology. He is one of the founders of Swiss Knots, a biennial conference on knot theory and low dimensional topology.
Érika Roldan’s mathematical research includes gamification and visualization technology. Since almost twenty years, she has been implementing and developing outreach and educational projects in South and North America and in several European countries with the main purpose of promoting the enjoyment and appreciation of mathematics and its application by the general public as well as increasing the enrollment of underrepresented minorities in STEAM. Erika founded BAMM at Ohio State University, Hypothesis, Matemorfosis and Music-Math.
She is currently leading the research group Stochastic Topology and its applications at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences. She is also affiliated with the Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence (ScaDS.AI) at Universität Leipzig, where she leads research projects on Computational Complexity, Educational technology and Learning Analytics. Before that, she was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow in the EuroTechPostdoc Programme at the Technische Universität München (TUM) and EPFL Lausanne. More infos: www.erikaroldan.net
