Bringing Math into The Conversation: My Summer as a Mass Media Fellow

If you’d asked me when I was a kid what I wanted to be when I grew up, “mathematician” wouldn’t have made the list. Even though I was considered “good at math” in school, I preferred to spend my time reading fantasy novels, doodling in sketchbooks, and performing silly plays with my friends. I didn’t see math as providing any avenue for creativity and exploration, and I didn’t know that being paid to think about math was even a possibility.

Now, as I pursue my PhD in math, I know that I was wrong on both counts. Not only do I pay my rent by thinking about abstract math, but I also have a great appreciation for the beauty and creativity that the field holds. Echoing some philosophers of science, I like to think of math as “the science of patterns”—it provides a framework within which to explore the natural human inclination to find structure in the world around us. As I dove deeper into my studies of math in college, I came to embrace the struggle of working through complicated proofs and the feeling of satisfaction when it finally all fell into place.

But as the math I studied got more and more abstract, I found it harder and harder to explain what it was that I was learning about. This wasn’t for lack of trying—I spent many late nights trying to explain to my college roommates what n-dimensional holes were and how homology counts them. I felt frustrated that math was often presented in a way that made people feel like they weren’t “a math person” and I became passionate about trying to make the subject more accessible and enjoyable for everyone. So when I heard about the Mass Media Fellowship, which pairs students with different news outlets across the country to work in science journalism for the summer, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to take a serious step in my mathematical communication journey.

Although I heard about the fellowship in college, I didn’t apply until a few years later since starting graduate school during the Covid-19 pandemic had put enough on my plate. I finally felt ready to apply in 2023, after my third year of graduate school, and I was pretty surprised to be selected as a 2023 Mass Media Fellow. I’d never written a news story before, I didn’t know anything about science journalism, and my area of research (algebraic topology) isn’t exactly something that comes up in the daily news. But my summer fellowship at The Conversation US showed me that both math and I can have a place in the newsroom.

The Conversation’s model is a bit different from a traditional news outlet. All of the articles published by The Conversation are written by academics and then edited by professional journalists. So during my fellowship I was mostly helping other academics write about their areas of expertise in a way that the public could understand. As an editor, I worked on a variety of articles about science, technology and, of course, math. Whether answering the age-old question “Will I ever need math in real life?” or exploring the mysterious origins of X in algebra, I happily snuck as much math as I could into The Conversation’s lineup.

I also had the chance to experience The Conversation’s process from the other side, as an author. I coauthored two articles, one in celebration of the 30th anniversary of Wiles’ announcement of his infamous solution to Fermat’s last theorem and another about how ancient ideas in Euclidean geometry have fueled centuries of mathematical research. I enjoyed getting to share these small glimpses into the world of math that I had come to love, and the positive feedback I got from The Conversation’s staff made these articles feel like a success.

The challenge of writing these articles was figuring out how to weave complex mathematical ideas into a compelling story that anyone could read and understand. It’s easy to forget that what is second-nature to you is incomprehensible jargon to someone else, and I had to be careful not to slip into exclusionary language. But The Conversation’s process is exactly designed to help with this issue. The editors I worked with for these articles were great at pointing out things that my academic training hid from view, like that the words “symmetry” and “finite” might need more explanation than I had originally given them.

I learned a lot over the summer, and I still have a lot to learn. Returning to the fourth year of my PhD program, I’ll continue to look for creative ways to help mathematicians tell their stories—both to each other and to the broader public. Even if I don’t end up becoming a science journalist, I know that the skills I gained as a Mass Media Fellow will be invaluable in my career and I’m so thankful that I got to have the experience.

More information on the AMS-AAAS Mass Media Fellowship can be found at https://www.ams.org/massmediafellow.