As the great Greek philosopher Epictetus said: “Man is not worried by real problems so much as by his imagined anxieties about real problems”. It’s comforting to know that even in ancient Greece anxiety was a thing. In this week’s episode, both storytellers share stories of a time where their fears got the better of them.

Part 1: When biologist Melina Giakoumis can’t find a single sea star she starts to worry she’s not cut out to be a scientist.

Melina Giakoumis is a PhD candidate in Biology at the City University of New York. She uses genomics, field surveys and ecological modeling to study marine invertebrates in the Atlantic Ocean. In particular, Melina is interested in the population dynamics of sea stars in the North Atlantic and their impact on the coastal community. Before starting her PhD, Melina was a research technician in the genomics lab of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where she sequenced the DNA of a huge variety of species, from bacteria to whales. Melina has spent lots of time poking around in the tide pools of New England, and hopes her research can be used for the conservation of these ecosystems. Melina currently lives in Philadelphia with her husband and two dachshunds.

Part 2: One question from a conference attendee sends math teacher Nancy Buck into panic spiral.

Nancy Buck currently teaches in a 6 - 12 school in Brooklyn. She is also a Master Teacher in the Math for America program. She believes that math is a beautiful and creative subject that allows people to understand the world around them. She works hard to create safe spaces so that all educators can see that both they and their students are mathematicians.

Episode Transcript

Part 1

I was standing on a rocky beach in Florida. I was wearing a wetsuit that was way too tight and it was constricting me around my neck. My skin was tacky from the salt water and my hair was tangled and brittle from the hours that I just spent in the ocean. I was also feeling like an absolute failure.

In my years as a technician, I had dreamed about this opportunity. To do my own field work and to collect samples myself instead of spending hours in the lab working on samples that other people had collected. But there I was, just blowing it.

I knew I had really good lab skills. I worked in a genomics lab for years and my hands were just made for pipettes, people. But all that time, all these researchers would come in and they would drop off their samples and they had these exhilarating stories about their wildlife encounters and their travel. They had this air of explorer about them, so I decided to apply for a PhD.

I got really, really lucky and I got into a lab that had a project available on sea stars, which you probably more commonly known as starfish. We stopped calling them starfish because they're not really fish and I always feel like I have to correct people, like, “Oh, you know, we call them sea stars.”

But if I'm being honest, and this probably makes me a bad biologist, I don't care at all what people call them. Because they aren't fish. We all know that. They're shaped like stars and they don't have faces.

Melina Giakoumis shares her story at sponsored show at the Schoodic Institute in Winter Harbor, Maine in June 2022. Photo by Owen Williams.

Anyway, I started out in this lab and I was working on this sea star project. And just a tiny bit of science for you guys, sea stars are what we call keystone species. They have a disproportionately large effect on the rest of their community. So when they're gone, their absence ripples out across the rest of the ecosystem.

That made me really excited because I wanted to work on research that could be applied to conservation. And if you want to preserve your coastlines, start with the sea stars.

So I started out in this lab and everyone was so nice and so excited to have me there, but we were having all these lab meetings and talking about some really high‑level theoretical concepts, like evolutionary modeling and ecological simulations. I just had no idea what anybody was talking about so I started to have a little bit of doubt. Maybe I should have just stuck with my pipettes. Maybe that's where I'm at my best.

But nobody else in the lab was really doing field work, so I figured, oh, maybe that could be my thing and I could be the one with the exciting stories who comes back and everyone's really jealous.

So I plan some field work. I emailed some marine biologists, because I'd never done this before. I was like, “Well, how do you go about finding a sea star?”

And they said, “You know, just go to the rocky beaches and flip over some rocks and they'll be there.”

I was like, “Okay.”

So I rented a car and I filled it with hundreds of vials. I got permits and I bought all this new equipment. I also asked my best friend to take two weeks off of work to come with me because I was so nervous about doing it by myself.

We ended up at our first beach in North Carolina and that was the first time I thought, “Oh, well, maybe it's not as easy as just flipping over a few rocks,” because we searched that beach for several hours and we found just one sea star. It was already dead and it had washed up on the beach the day before in a storm.

I was supposed to be in charge so we got back in the car. I was talking to my friend, I was like, “Don't worry. There's better days ahead. It's a weird day. There was a storm yesterday. It's going to be fine.”

But that's how I found myself two weeks later on that Florida beach with my tangled hair and my constrictive wetsuit and feeling like a failure. Because two weeks had gone by and dozens of beaches had been visited and we still had only found that one dead sea star on that North Carolina beach.

Melina Giakoumis holding a tiny sea star while conducting a survey.

That's actually a lie. We did have some extra samples. They were from a touch tank at an aquarium that we had passed. They had collected them locally so I begged them to let me take some of their tissue samples, because I didn't want to go home empty-handed. These were tissues that I needed to sequence the DNA of these sea stars.

So I sat there on this Florida beach and I was thinking like how could this happen. I had done all this research before I had left and there had been this survey that was done in the 1970s of these species. In some places, they were so abundant that they were just carpeting the sea floor, up to 20 sea stars per quarter meter squared.

Also, none of the marine biologists that I had emailed had warned me that this could happen. So that just left one answer, that it was me. I didn't understand evolutionary modeling and I also couldn't make it as a field biologist, so I probably just should have stuck with my pipettes.

And so I was looking around at this beach and there were all these people walking around, beachcombing and having a really nice day, and I remembered when beaches made me feel that way. That they brought me joy and they inspired me to pursue a career in marine biology. But right now, I was feeling like I never wanted to see another beach again.

I couldn't wait to go home, but I also dreaded going home because I was so embarrassed and ashamed that I was going home empty-handed. But I did go home. Actually, everyone was really, really nice about it. They actually felt pretty bad for me. And after a while, I sort of felt like, okay, I have no choice but to make this project work, so I plan more field work.

And in between my other courses and stuff, I started going by myself in my car, up and down the east coast of North America looking for sea stars in places where they had been found historically and finding none. That was about a year that I was doing that.

One of these solo field trips that I took was to a Provincetown in Cape Cod. Provincetown had some historical sea star records. I was doing some research and I saw there was like a rocky jetty in Provincetown called the Provincetown Causeway that looked like it could be some potentially good sea star habitat.

So I got in my car and, six hours later, there I was in Provincetown and it was a gorgeous day. I get out of the car and I put on my waders. I have my bucket and my backpack full of sampling equipment and I start wading out at low tide. People like to hike on the causeway when they are vacationing in Provincetown, so there's all these people in their flip-flops just walking on the jetty and looking down at me super suspiciously.

I'm hiking along, like shuffling in the sand and it's a beautiful day. There are all these horseshoe crabs out that day and they're gliding along on the sandy sea floor and bumping into my boots. I'm just sort of daydreaming about the lobster roll I'm going to have for dinner when, out of the corner of my eye, I see this flash of purple. My heart starts pounding and like there's this spotlight shining down on that flash of purple.

I make my way over to this big boulder and I crouch down and I crane my neck. And there, curled up under this rock, is a sea star folded up with one purple arm sticking out. So I crouched down. I pry the sea star off the mussel bed that it's feasting on and it falls off into my hand. It's cold and it's bumpy and it’s tube feeder wriggling around in my palm.

I'm looking at this thing and I'm like, “I've been chasing you for a year and here you are, just casually sitting in my hand.” It looked so small and so fragile.

So I get really excited. I make my way over to a big flat rock and I make that into a makeshift lab bench. I whip my backpack around and I'm trying to pull a little bit of tissue from the sea star. I pull just a couple tube feet. Don't worry. They can regenerate those really quickly.

As I'm doing this, I see another flash of purple at the corner of my eye. There's a sea star tucked into the crevice of my makeshift lab bench. All in all, on that day in Provincetown, I found eight sea stars in under ten minutes.

I drove around to other beaches in Massachusetts that weekend and I found dozens more samples. They weren't really that abundant but there were a handful of sea stars on each beach. By the end of that weekend, my whole world view had just shifted. I realized that these animals are actually really easy to find when they're there. So flipping over a few rocks actually wasn't bad advice.

It turns out these animals have been declining really significantly since that last survey from the 1970s and nobody was really documenting it. So I decided to reshape part of my dissertation to investigate this and to quantify the change and to dig into possible causes and consequences.

Three years after that beautiful day in Provincetown, I went to that same beach to do a survey of abundance of these sea stars. It was a similarly beautiful day, you know, gulls overhead, sunny, but that day there were no horseshoe crabs and there were no mussels and there were, definitely, no sea stars.

But this time I didn't doubt my abilities. I didn't think it was my fault. Instead, I just marveled at how quickly things are changing. These communities are changing not just at the scale of one person's lifetime but at the scale of one person's dissertation.

So this time I thought, “Okay, at least there's a field biologist here now to tell their story. if I work hard and I don't doubt myself, then I can make a difference.”

Thank you.

Part 2

It is January 2010 and I am one semester away from getting my master's in math. I have written the first chapter of my thesis and I'm about to give my very first talk at the joint math meetings.

Now, I am no stranger to math conferences. My father is a math professor and I was the lucky girl whose family vacations were based off of the location of math conferences. One of my favorites is when we went to San Diego, the one week a year that it rains in southern California.

So we're going to the joint math meetings with my parents again in San Francisco and they are brimming with pride. My father is walking around and everybody he knows, he says, “Nancy's giving her first math talk.”

And I'm like, “You don't have to tell everybody, Dad. I don't need a big crowd. It's okay. It's my first talk.”

I really liked my mom's version a lot more. She's the type of mom who wants to get you a prize, and that's what she calls it. “We're going to get you a prize for giving your first math talk.” So she and I go to our favorite part of the math conferences, the vendors.

We walk in and we're walking around. I actually point out the MFA booth to her because I had just found out I was starting my fellowship in May with orientation. And we were looking for something special. And then we see it, this 50‑year‑old man surrounded in knitted Klein bottle hats and Mobius strip scarves of all different colors.

So we walk up and we start looking at them. My mom's a chatter, so she's telling this man about how I'm giving my first math talk.

Nancy Buck shares her story at Gerald D. Fischbach Auditorium in New York City at a show sponsored by Math for America in May 2022. Photo by Zhen Qin.

And he asks, “What's your talk on?”

And I say, “Quadratic reciprocity over the Gaussian integers.”

And then it happens. He asks, “What's quadratic reciprocity?”

And I can't speak. I am shaking and tears are coming into my eyes, because I don't know the answer to this question. I can give a nice little proof and I'm just standing there, frozen. And before the tears can drop, I walk away.

I'm walking past all of these vendors tears streaming down my face and I find this little curtain that I can go hide behind in the part of the space that they don't need. And I just sit there and I cry, because I know I don't belong here. And everybody else is going to find out too because this is my nightmare, the part of the talk where you ask, “Are there any questions?”

I'm realizing that everybody is going to find out I am not a mathematician. I don't know what I am. But it is not that and I do not belong because I might not know the answer.

My mom comes around the corner and she's like, “Girl, you got to get it together.” She's like, “That man feels awful back there. What's going on?” And she's like, “You have been studying this for six months. You know what quadratic reciprocity is. Go tell him.”

So I stand up and I wipe my face off and I walk back to his booth. With my blotchy, red face and tears still in my eyes and a quakey voice, I do my best and I tell him what quadratic reciprocity is.

The next day, I gave my talk. And at the end I asked, “Are there any questions? Thank you. Have a great day.”

And then I graduated. I finished my thesis and I got my master's in math.

This moment for me has defined my teaching and philosophy in my classroom because, for me, my focus is math identity. Because there is this story in this country that you either know how to do math or you don't. So I'll be in the classroom and my students are taking an assessment. I look over and this beautiful mathematician is holding back tears, because she obviously is having trouble with a question.

And I say, “I know this feeling.”

I walk over to her and I say, “Layla, let's go out into the hallway for a second,” because the hallway is the only private place in a school.

So we go stand in the hallway and I say, “Go ahead and cry, girl. It's okay. It's okay to have this emotion. Because, here's the thing. You are not a good mathematician in spite of this moment. You are an amazing mathematician because of this moment, because you are struggling which means you have not given up. You are persevering.

So go, wash your face, take a few laps, take a few breaths, and when you get back to your seat there will be a new paper for you and you're going to try again.”

And she did it. This is why my dissertation is on math identity. This is why I talk about math identity to anybody, because I am trying to convince this country that every mathematician that has ever existed and will ever exist has had a question where they did not know the answer.

Thank you.