Join us this January in San Diego for this FREE show in partnership with Springer Nature and in conjunction with the American Mathematical Society's Joint Mathematics Meeting. We'll present five true, personal stories from mathematicians about the experiences that have shaped their lives and careers.
Hosted by Erin Barker and Shane Hanlon.
Reserve your FREE spot here:
Stories by:
Seth Cottrell is amazed by the universe and thinks you should be too. Starting in childhood, he studied math to be better at physics and ended up researching quantum information and earning his PhD in mathematics from NYU. In 2008 he and a friend created a traveling booth, “Ask a Mathematician / Ask a Physicist”, appearing first at Burning Man and then in public parks around New York City, where they talked with strangers about the universe and the things in it. Seth quickly learned that practically everyone is boiling over with curiosity, but often don’t know what to ask or where to start. For all those people who said “I never thought to ask that!” he created “askamathematician.com," a collection of questions and answers from emails and conversations. More recently, Seth wrote a book, “Do Colors Exist? (and other profound physics questions)”, based on nine years of questions from the website such as “How do we know that Pi never repeats?” “What would Earth be like to us if it were a cube?” and “Does quantum mechanics really say there is more than one me?” When he’s not teaching or writing, Seth lives with his wife Lauren, a psychiatrist and artist, in San Diego.
Moon Duchin is an associate professor of Mathematics, a senior fellow in the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life, and the director of the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at Tufts University. Her pure math work is in geometry, topology, groups, and dynamics. Her applied pure math is just taking off: she is currently collaborating with civil rights organizers, coders, political scientists, lawyers, geographers, and philosophers on a large-scale project to detect and address gerrymandering.
Piper Harron received her PhD in mathematics from Princeton University in January 2016. More interestingly, she started in 2003, left in 2009, lectured at Northeastern for three semesters, then stopped working and had two children born in 2011 and 2014. Her PhD thesis received recognition for its humorous style and blunt social commentary (Spoiler: math culture is oppressive), and she has traveled to many institutions around the country and in Canada to talk about her experiences trying to survive other people's good intentions. She is currently a postdoc in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
Ken Ono is the Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Mathematics at Emory University. He is the Vice President of the American Mathematical Society, and he considered to be an expert in the theory of integer partitions and modular forms. His contributions include several monographs and over 160 research and popular articles in number theory, combinatorics and algebra. He received his Ph.D. from UCLA and has received many awards for his research in number theory, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Packard Fellowship and a Sloan Fellowship. He was awarded a Presidential Early Career Award for Science and Engineering (PECASE) by Bill Clinton in 2000 and he was named the National Science Foundation’s Distinguished Teaching Scholar in 2005. He serves as Editor-in-Chief for two Springer-Nature journals and is an editor of Springer's The Ramanujan Journal. He was also an Associate Producer of the Hollywood film The Man Who Knew Infinity which starred Jeremy Irons and Dev Patel.
Daniele C. Struppa, Ph.D., is the President of Chapman University in Orange, California. Before assuming this title in 2016, he had served as Chapman University’s Chancellor (Chief Academic Officer) for ten years, and as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at George Mason University for nine years. Dr. Struppa is a mathematician, whose expertise is in the field of Fourier Analysis. He is the author of ten volumes, more than 200 peer reviewed publications, and holds several patents in the field of signal processing. Dr. Struppa has received numerous awards, including the 2016 Cozzarelli Prize from the National Academy of Sciences, and is a member of the National Academy of Inventors. Dr. Struppa was born in Milano, Italy, in 1955, and came to the United States in 1978, to pursue his Ph.D. at the University of Maryland; after a few years in Italy, he came back to the United States as a professor of mathematics at George Mason University in 1988. Dr. Struppa is married to Mary Elizabeth (Lisa) Sparks, who is the Dean of the School of Communication at Chapman University, and is the father of four children, Alessandro, Elena, Arianna, and Athena.