Talking Maths in Public Podcast - Episode 3: Math Exposition, standing around holding a snake, and the World’s Most Interesting Mathematician Full transcript Welcome to the Talking Maths in Public podcast, the community podcast for members of TMiP, a UK network for every flavour of maths communicator. My name's Katie Steckles, and I'm a mathematician and maths communicator, and a member of the Talking Maths in Public team. The podcast is a chance for members of the community to share stories of maths communication projects, and discuss how we communicate maths. In this episode, we'll be hearing the second part of our interview with YouTuber Grant Sanderson, talking about his math communication competition, Summer of Math Exposition. We'll also hear from maths lecturer, podcaster, and author Peter Rowlett, who I chatted with about how maths is communicated by people outside of mathematics. And finally, TMiP's Sam Durbin talked to statistician Sophie Carr about being the world's most interesting mathematician 2019. To see links to the things discussed in this episode, and find more episodes, you can visit talkingmathsinpublic.uk/podcast. --- In our last episode, we heard the first part of an interview between TMIP team member Ben Sparks and YouTuber Grant Sanderson. In this second part, we'll hear about Grant's maths communication competition, Summer of Math Exposition. Other things have been changing there too. It's now been a few years since you started the Summer of Maths, sorry, the Summer of Math Exposition. For some reason I find that very hard to say. The Summer of Math Exposition was a competition that wasn't really a competition, but it got that flavour a few years ago. I forget now exactly, three years ago? 2021 was the first one. So tell us a little bit about that, because I think that's very relevant to the people listening to this podcast in the Talking Maths in Public community in the UK. For anyone who doesn't know what it is, can you describe what it is and why me calling it a competition might not be accurate? It actually started with an internship that I was running that summer, where I, it was, I just wanted basically to revamp the website. It was a thing unrelated to videos, and I put out an application for interns. And in it, I was like, here's the thing I want done. But also, if you wanted to spend one day of the week working on your own project of math exposition, just pitch me on what that would be. I'm happy to advise on what that project would be. I got around 2,500 applicants, and then me and someone I was working with named James Schloss, we like said, okay let's look through these. And the first pass, it was mainly, one of the questions was like, have you done a project related have you done any kind of personal project or something like that? And If there wasn't anything that they linked to there, then just pass and then try to look at what they were and then, look at the descriptions, things like that. Long story short, I intended to hire like one or two. We whittled it down. There was four that I just really liked and so took them on. But the main thing I was thinking is, man, there's so many project pitches I've just seen in all these applications from these like college students saying what they would work on the summer if they could just do their own bit of math exposition. And I was thinking it's such a waste to not let them - to not provide some sort of impetus to have them just do that anyway. And they don't need me- they don't need me to sit there as a, the employer of their internship to do it. I was like, "what if instead I provided a clear deadline, I provided a promise that the good ones will get featured in some way". And I had a little bit of like cash prize associated with those. It's a, as an impetus, as a way of saying "that thing that you thought maybe you would do if you were in this internship: do it anyway. Just do it anyway. It's great for the world." I think there was a phrase you used earlier, it might have been before we pressed record, you called it a forcing function. Is that what we're talking about here? Forcing functions are great, and deadlines are so good for that. And a shared deadline with a community is amazing for that. And so, we did it and the - like it's- so it's a competition, because you know rather than just framing it as "hey maybe let's have this like festival of making stuff"; it's nice to know that your thing might get featured I can't feature everything so I say okay I'll feature like five of them so I have to have some way of selecting five of them and so you have a certain you know there's going to be some notion of ranking but I tried to frame it all throughout that the goal is not to be like one of the best ones there. The goal is that we just have more good explainers out online. And especially if there's some way to get feedback during that process. And what we did is, because there were going to be like over a thousand submissions, and I can't look through that many entries, we set up a simple peer review system that was based on a hackathon judging system, where basically people would look at pairs of videos - videos or articles, like it didn't have to be video - and basically say, which one is better according to some criteria that I put along: saying, is the lesson well motivated? Is it clear? Does it add something novel to the space? Things like this. And then all those pairwise rankings from all the people kind of peer reviewing would generate algorithmically like a loose ordering. And the ordering doesn't have to be perfect. The constraint is that I wanted to make sure that whatever the top five true best ones were, insofar as that's not an ill defined notion, they show up somewhere in the top hundred. So that if I look through the top hundred, I know I'm going to find like the five true best ones. A rough sort is better than no sort. Yes. What I did not anticipate is just how valuable that peer review component was for very interesting reason. So if we just limit our view to the YouTube videos, what I noticed is that a lot of the videos I was watching, even though they're on a fresh channel and I hadn't done anything to feature them, this was just, they had submitted, this channel had zero videos before, they would have a meaningful number of views, like tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of views. And usually the big disappointment, if you pour your heart into a new project and you put it out on a platform, that's so voluminous as YouTube that just has so many things, is you pour your heart into something and like it just doesn't get to people - no one really watches it. So it's like "this is cool", that there's something about this that got it to be viewed by more people. Now on the one hand it's going to be viewed by the peer reviewers, but that's at most a dozen people; it's- that's not accounting for the 10,000. I think what's happening here is that when YouTube recommends content, it's this machine learning algorithm that's doing something to try to estimate, is there going to be valued watch time if we present this to someone, but that machine learning algorithm is way too expensive to run on like the four, like the billions of videos that exist. So you have to have something that first decides which videos might be considered. by the ML algorithm. And you need a very cheap algorithm to do that, something that you could apply to like the billions of videos to simply nominate them for consideration. And so that might consist of things like are you subscribed to the channel? Or have you watched a video from that channel in the last 30 days? Or, if someone else watched this video and they also watched a third video, like a second video, and you watched that second video, maybe they're like linked together in that way and they call this the co watch graph. So my hypothesis on what happened with the peer review process with the Summer of Math exposition is that we had this pile of a thousand videos that a whole bunch of people from a shared community were watching that gets them together in this co watch graph such that if any one of them stands out for some other reason, it's an established channel, for whatever reason it gets shared a lot. And it pulls the whole connected graph. Yeah, it doesn't necessarily pull them up. But it pulls them up to be considered. It pulls them up to even be considered. So therefore, if it's another piece of good content and it's being considered, then, the, there's a chance to be seen. And we found this again with the Summer of Math Exposition 2, Summer of Math Exposition 3, like the peer review process, even though originally it was this, I don't know, slapdash effort to make the final judgment. That's the heart of the event. And so for this year originally James and I, cause James is the one who actually really runs this, James Schloss. He's the he keeps himself behind the curtains, I think sometimes and people will attribute more to me than I deserve, but he like, he keeps that whole ship running in terms of managing the community, managing the peer review section. If you want to share any links towards his work. Absolutely. Absolutely. Let's do Laos OS, SimulAos, these are the sorts of like online presences he has. Sorry, it used to be Laos OS. So we wanted a break basically. We wanted to like work on some of our own other things this summer. I know it can take a lot of his time. The peer, the like final review process, it'll be like quite a bit of my time, but also more importantly, it's very stressful to make this final judgment because I, judgments are always hard because people will read more into it than you maybe want them to, but you could have done it anyway. And again, in the spirit of not just saying the trite things, but maybe a little bit more raw on this podcast, let me, if I'm making my own content, I think a big part of making content that is ultimately good is to be very judgmental of it. I know that I have a lot of flaws in the stuff that I make. And I look at past stuff and I see those flaws very brightly. I know there's flaws that I'm just not seeing now, but in the future when I'll look, I'll see it. And I try my hardest to see what they are. Sometimes I see it and I don't fix it. That's all good. But there's this mindset of being like, an asshole in assessing the quality here. So if I take that same lens and then I'm applying it to other people's videos the same way that I would look at my own and reviewing, I can just always come up with lots of problems. It might still be a great video, it might still be a great lesson, and definitely add something to the internet, but I'm just very aware of all the problems. And so there's this hard thing about choosing one where I say this is the winner, above the rest, and Because it's like everyone has problems and I, I don't want people to, it's I don't want, it's very hard somehow to hold something up as if it's the paragon and say, this is the thing to pattern match off of when I know that there's problems. What I also don't want to do is in that announcement video say, I'm choosing this as a winner, But here's all of its problems because that's a jerk thing to say, right? I want it to, I want it to be a little bit more positive. So endorsing things like you have this double edged thing, right? You want to say, this is great. You don't want to have to list all its flaws because that's not what you're there for. And yet, if you care about your own judgment and quality of your own videos, you can't endorse something if there are flaws that you feel like, but people are going to think I don't see that. Not just don't see that. But then, I don't want people to pattern match off of the wrong things when they, for example, what's very painful actually in making the judgments, I see the flaws of my own videos reflected right back to me in the- for example, earlier channel videos and maybe even current ones, like the background music would sometimes be too distracting. I've put- I've, I've gone back and forth with the function of background music. I know there's some subset of the audience who just will not like it. I've done surveys and I've, I think used right, it, it adds more than it can detract, but it's very easy to use. But then you notice that on someone else. And so there's a number of videos where I'd hear, I'm like, ah, the music's just too distracting. And it sometimes would be my own music, right? They're clearly better matching off of what's on my channel. Or it would be like over animated in some way, like a thing's just being animated in a way that doesn't need to, and doesn't add clarity. It's okay, this might be something where I'm Guilty there or I maybe don't motivate topics as well as I ought to and I have an assumption with certain things like if you're landing on this video it's because you're motivated to learn about it and actually what would be better is to spend the first minute or two just really clearly explaining why someone should care rather than just hoping that they're a math nerd who's intrinsically interested in the puzzle. This is very viscerally clear to me if I'm watching some stuff and I'm watching like a hundred videos and just back to back I just need a reason to care as I'm watching it. Yeah that's a really astute, observation, I say it's astute, it's almost inevitable if you watch hundreds of videos, but it's still good to crystallize it because I think it's something that all of us communicators in whatever format, whether we're making videos, giving talks, writing books, if you don't regularly consume content like you're trying to create, you have missed the chance to feel the pain of when it goes wrong. badly and if you don't feel that pain you don't get the sort of alarm bells when you need to get them in your own content and yeah you can spend too long and it becomes a very disheartening procedure and i recognize what you just said you start to feel like the asshole because if you're so hypercritical of your own content which has to happen because you are the last sort of judge there but if you turn that on for someone else's content it can be misinterpreted very easily if all the the sort of built in things you notice and I'm just not- I'm just not gonna post a video featuring winners that like- that disses them in some way. I could have that as an online personality in some sense That would be a little bit more raw and honest and like that would be more enjoyable to watch I'm, just not going to do that. That's not the point of your experiment. I've got a little bit of a Mr. Rogers vibe, going in terms of like my online personality That I, I'd love to maintain so anyway I started all of this as explaining, James wanted a break, I wanted a little break. We weren't going to do it this year, but the community expressed a lot of interest in doing like a bottom up community version. And given that we had one, two, and three, they were going to call this the summer of math exposition pi, because it's, it's a little bit, it's not quite four. Which I loved. And I'm in full support of this. And I think because the heart of it is the peer review system. I said that I would like happily offer support to make sure that there's funding to improve the errors we had with the peer review system and just make sure that system works well. And if the ultimate output from this year. Is there's a shared deadline everyone submits. And the thing that's produced is not my own choices of top five or top 25 or something. It's just the rough ordered list that comes out of that system. I think that would be a 80 percent of the value, 90 percent of the value, even if there's not the final winner selection. And we'll see if that, that bears out. And hopefully including the effect that you talked about as well, where we're almost playing the algorithm by having people peer review. This is just everyone. Everyone's a winner here because you get lots of people to watch. Good and bad content. I'm sure they're all in the mix here But everything is getting dragged up by the fact that actually that little connected graph of youtube's corner There is probably going to get pulled up en masse very slightly or at least have more exposure than it would otherwise And that's the way I think about it is that if the video is good it will get viewed by people in a way that's not just going to be shouting into the void. There's no guarantee that it's going to get views though, because ultimately the algorithm is trying to optimize for whether people are going to enjoy the thing they watched. So it's not a strong guarantee, but it's as strong as I could possibly imagine for, making it worthwhile to try your hand at making a piece of exposition. And I'll say, it doesn't have to be fancy. I think a lot of people, like I said, they'll try to produce it really well in the hopes of that. What really matters is do you have an interesting thing to describe and are you describing it clearly. Is it something people care to learn about or that you can make them care to learn about in the first 30 seconds of your piece, whether that's a video, an article, and do you explain it well, doesn't matter if that's well animated, it could be done with, pen and paper, if animations are what you think is most necessary for the clarity, run with it, if there's anything else that has production quality aligning with that goal of clarity, run with it, but don't feel like if you haven't had experience with videos you're playing at a disadvantage. I think people really understand the spirit. And I believe we used the phrase, you have to start somewhere. Yeah. You've got to start somewhere. And expecting the first output to be the the greatest hit you ever produce is probably a mistake. Hey, it might happen, but you've got to, if you don't do any of them, you're never going to get it. And I, what's the, I think it's even Matt Parker that says sometimes the perfect is the enemy of the good. If you want it to be perfect, you're going to have a hard time meeting the deadline. So get something out there. I'm really glad that the summer of math exposition, whatever, whether it's an official one or not exists as that forcing function, because I know that pressure of, I want to do something. And then 10 years later, you haven't done it unless someone puts this sort of token deadline. So I'm really glad this exists and well done for making it happen. However much you want to disown some of it. Again, James deserves a lot of the credit. I just want to be clear. Let's make sure we can link to James's online presence as well. If there's anything he wants to share on there, then send it in the show notes. I think we should round off our discussion here. We've talked quite a lot about the background of 3Blue1Brown, and what you're up to and where things are going and how Manim developed. We've talked a little bit about the Summer of Math Exposition, which, and there is a version of that happening this summer, even if you're taking a step back and seeing what the community builds with it. And we know there's going to be more 3Blue1Brown and more forks of Manim, I swear as well, in the future. Yeah. That there will be. So Grant, thank you very much for talking to us. We will, I'm sure tap you up to chat again on the, on some other team event. But for the meantime, thanks very much for joining in. Thanks for having me. If you'd like to check out the entries to this year's SOME competition, or find out more, you can find the project website at some.3b1b.co. --- Next up, it's our regular obtuse angles feature where we share our own opinions on mass communication. I chatted with Peter Rowlett about how STEM communicators more generally can be a bit shy about the M in STEM. So I guess we tend to mainly talk about maths outreach. But I think one thing that always interests me is that I end up doing maths outreach stuff at science festivals and at events that are more broad, science outreach events. And It really intrigues me, the way that maths is presented by people who aren't mathematicians, or who aren't just mathematicians, because there's this really obvious thing that everyone who actually works in science definitely knows is definitely true, which is that everyone is doing maths. Chemists are doing maths, biologists are doing loads of maths, and starts, physicists are basically just doing maths, engineering is just maths and the fact that if you're a school child, your entire universe is split up into this room is the room where we do science, this room is the room where we do maths, and you don't think of them as being the same. And you end up with this situation where kids go to uni to do for example, a degree in engineering, and I know people who've found people come to uni to do a degree in engineering and go. Oh, I need maths for this. And it's probably a failure of their teachers not telling them that this is the case, but it might be connected to the fact that when you go to a science festival, there is this clear kind of, over here is people doing biology, over there is, if it even is bothered to include, people doing maths. And there's not often you get someone saying "come and do biology: It's just some stats and a bit of remembering what things are called", you know? That's probably an oversimplification. I'm not a biologist, but there is a lot of statistics involved, right? And that may not be the most exciting part of biology to present. Exactly. Like somebody stood over there with a snake. Yeah, so are they being disingenuous if they're saying to kids, come and learn biology, it's all standing around holding snakes. When in fact, when they get to uni, they're going to be like, "what's a T-test? And why are we doing so many of them?" You certainly get a lot of that. You get students who are doing chemistry, biology, even all sorts of things, but within science like that, that who- yeah, they don't realize that this is what they've signed up for. And I've come across degrees where it's hidden in module - it's not in the module title. There'll be a module where you learn maths and stats and it's called something like, fundamental skills for chemistry or something like that. Methods. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Should be called 'mathods'. Ah. That's a pun. No, but it's, yeah, I think that there is this thing at that early age when you're learning about these things that they keep them so separate. Yeah. And. I guess in general, schools need to, do need to, I have no qualifications for making statements like this, but I feel like it would be great if schools did more cross curricular stuff, but I realize it's the most difficult thing to schedule and budget and plan, but looking at the ways that these subjects interact with each other, and thinking because mathematicians and math teachers are always trying to find ways to motivate it, whereas if, people come to uni with an understanding that maths is so fundamental across everything else, they won't necessarily need that kind of motivation adding to what they're doing. So how does that work in a science fair context? Because often, my observation would be that you don't often get a math stall. But if you do get a math stall, you often don't get the sort of thing that actually gets done as maths at university. Yeah, there's a much lower level, isn't it? Yeah, you often get people standing there with a Klein bottle or a Mobius strip or a something like this, and then you find out the degree their university does doesn't do any topology until the fourth year - if you take the fourth year - or something like that, you know? So you end up just presenting these, "Ah, this is the exciting thing. Look at this fractal". Yes, you might do a module on fractals in the final year as an option or whatever it is, you know? So in when in maths, we aren't presenting the boring bits if you like or the fundamental underpinning bits. So how do you get to identifying that in other disciplines? Yeah, I guess you've got options because if you want people at a science festival to be able to engage with something and do it, you need stuff that's at their level. And in the science subject that can quite often be engaging with something as in meet an animal or, see a physical process happening. And in maths, Yeah, you can't really do it at the same level that people doing research are doing it at, or even at university level. I have seen, I've seen both approaches, so either you take it really low down and you just have some puzzles and a Rubik's Cube and some things for people to play with. And that's great, but it doesn't give you a sense of what maths is. And it, again, it also doesn't relate it in any way to what you do at school, in the school classroom, because it's so different from that. I've also seen researchers from a maths department bring along really nice fluid dynamics demos and things that are actually really physics. And show that and be like, look, this is maths. And it's applied maths, but yeah. But yeah, how do you cross Like somewhere between those two extremes. I think it was a few years ago at the Big Bang Fair. I don't I've not been, I'm not going this year, so I don't know whether continuing this. But they had a campaign called Maths Counts. And they basically had every stallholder, when they submitted their proposal for what they were going to do was asked to think about whether or not maths is involved in what they're doing. I feel like that shouldn't be a tick box. That should be just like, Maths is involved in what you're doing given this. And then they had to prepare an answer to the question, how do you use maths in your work? And if they'd tick the box, which hopefully everyone had, but I don't know, they got a little sign with the Maths Counts logo and they had a few kind of activities and we did a bit of busking around it to try and promote this idea, but the idea was that kids could go around this fair and if they see the Maths Counts logo, they can say, All right then, tell me how you use maths. And that was quite a nice little I've no idea to what extent this was taken up, whether people actually did this, but it did make the people on the stall think about that and have an answer to that question prepared, which they may have ended up using as part of conversations they were having anyway on the stall. So at least to that extent, they'd incorporated it in a very broad way. But at the same time, the only math stalls at that were either this, make a phone cube out of pieces come and see this thing that's actually not strictly maths, it's actually a physical process or something that we're modeling with maths. I don't know. That's quite nice though, because it is getting you to think about to think about it. Because I reckon if somebody walked up to you and said, how do you use maths and you're a practicing scientist, you might say, gosh, the servers are complicated, and I'd do a thing with a massive amount of data or something like that. Whereas if you've had a prompt to think about it in advance, you might be able to put that in a way that's a bit more accessible. Yeah. If all scientists had to prepare an answer to that question every time they're doing any kind of outreach, maybe that would help. If you have your own obtuse angle on an aspect of maths communication, and would like to share it with us for potential use in a future podcast, you can find the submission form at talkingmathsinpublic.uk/podcast. --- For our final segment, TMIP team member Sam Durbin spoke to Sophie Carr, who's a past winner of the Aperiodical's Big Internet Math Off, about her journey to becoming the world's most interesting mathematician. I'm here with Dr. Sophie Carr, who was the 2019 winner of the Big Internet Math Off and is therefore the most interesting mathematician in 2019. Sophie. Hello. I am going to say that I am still the world's most interesting mathematician. I think I've still got about two weeks of that left, haven't I? You have, because there hasn't been another competition since. Excellent. No. Was there one in 2020? No, there wasn't, because there was the pandemic. There was a Big Lockdown Math Off in 2020. But it wasn't the world's most interesting mathematician. So I think I'm gonna hold the crown for being the longest world's most interesting mathematician for quite a while to come. Sophie, tell me what the Big Internet Math Of is. So I think the simplest way of explaining it is that it's a really great way to introduce people to lots of maths ideas that they might not have heard of. in a way that anybody can understand. I don't think at all you have to be a mathematician to get involved. What you have to want is to just have a bit of an inquiring mind to learn about maths and different ideas. What I loved was when I was on it that I just learned so much about areas of maths that hadn't really interested me but were presented in such a way it's oh, look at that. It's more about, Being developing and communicating ideas and opening up the wonders of maths to everybody is what I think. I think it's probably called a competition, but I think it's much more about a joyous celebration of the wonders of maths than necessarily a competition. Lovely. How does it work? What happens is a bunch of people get persuaded to write about areas of maths that they really like. And then I think it runs like a football tournament, for want of a better phrase. We have some opening rounds where you have to put ideas forward and then you have to be voted for. And that honestly was the part when I did it that used to make me feel like going in a school. School selection match of could you please vote for me? Do you like my thing? Am I okay? Am I gonna get picked first? And then if you get enough points you get through to the quarterfinals and the semifinals So I think in total you have to write maybe four or five ideas up and then as you go through these rounds You have to put them out and it gets harder and harder to come up with ideas because you do your very favorite ones at the start And then you have to keep coming up with those, but I think I had to write five, in fact I did, I had to write five, five ideas. And could it be five, anything, completely linked or just really disparate bits of maths that you like? Disparate. Very disparate. So the advice I was given. was write about bits of maths that really interest you. So for my first three ones, I ended up doing the Navier Stokes equations, which were just the thing that, that hooked me as a teenage. I thought, awesome. Bernoulli's equation, of course, that makes stuff fly, and trains suck, and it's just brilliant. And then I did probability tables. So three really disparate areas, but the things I loved. Oh, that's lovely. Yeah. Yeah, it's just what makes you laugh. And then I think for the final two I stuck with more probability. So I did Simpson's paradox. And my final was nothing more than decision trees, just probability tables from, When you do GCSEs. Lovely. So I've known you for a long time, Sophie, and I know you're a statistician and you do loads of exciting stat stuff. So it's nice to see that there's this whole wide range of different bits that actually my favourite bit is this. Yeah, Bernoulli's- without those I wouldn't have my career. Those were the things when I did A Level Physics, because I loved A Level Physics. I thought A Level Maths was brilliant. Or it was just a necessary evil and I'm quite open about that. I only did maths because I wanted to do physics and then I did engineering and I had to have maths and it took me a long time to get into maths. So Bernoullis and don't forget, Navier Stokes are the only one of the Clay Institute, the Millennium Prizes. They're the only ones you don't have to solve to win the prize. You only have to make a substantial improvement. I've not done that either, but I love the fact that you don't No one has, to be fair. No one's improved and no one's solved. All the others you have to solve. Navier Stokes you don't have to solve. That's for somebody else to worry about. And I'm thinking that your pitches can be, it can be anything. You could write something up and do, or do a blog post or a video or whatever you like, whatever works for you. So when I did mine, I'd write it up and I'd do a little video that went onto YouTube and cue me learning how to use a mobile phone to record and find enough plain colored jumpers against a plain background. And I did actually go to the IMA and play with a Bernoulli's machine to show. I did quite a few sort of interactions, and for for the one where I talked about the Monty Hall problem, I baked lots of cakes. I don't think you have to bake cakes, but yeah, it's finding ways to communicate that people will understand. We buried the lead here, but you obviously won. I did. It is still to this day, I find it absolutely hysterical that I managed to get a world title and I didn't have to run or jump and no sporting prowess was required. To hold the world title and I've held it for the length of an Olympics. This is good I think this is a much better way to get a world title. How does it differ from all the other outreach you've done? Because that's how I, that's how I know Sophie, we've been doing outreach for a long time. Okay, it is fundamentally different. When we do the outreach, and I know you and I have known, from the Royal Institution maths, maths classes and various ways like that. When you do that, it's tailored to a really, specific audience and it's also tailored to a very time constrained audience of what can I get over to you and we're going to do this interactive thing and it's got to be about an hour or two hours or whatever it is. Particularly if you're going into schools and you're doing assemblies or it has to fit within a lesson or that time frame. From the math off, you have the ability to write something that people can watch over and over again, or read in much slower time. From that perspective, you can go into a little bit more depth, because you can say, oh, there's this idea, or have a look at this site, or have a go at doing something else. So from that way, you can be more in depth and more open, but you're writing for the general public. This is not aimed at, I am doing a maths degree or I am a mathematician. This is, Ooh that's really interesting, isn't it? So finding how you write something and get people to read it, I think is much harder. And then there is the voting element, which is the really scary part, because if you have to do a masterclass and there's just blank screens, that's one thing, going, Hi. Anybody want to vote for me? Because I'm not really on social media. Do you want to vote for me? That, that's the fundamentally different part. And accepting that some people might not like it, that's okay. But that's the difference. It's a different presentation style and asking people to like you. I always find it really interesting watching the votes I'm not very good at going in and reading, but taking the time to go in and actually look at the stuff, but I see the voting and it's when someone's pitched up against one of the sort of maths communication greats and the really popular YouTubers and things, and you go who's going to vote? Are they going to vote for the people they know? Are they going to vote for the bit of maths? And it's always really interesting seeing that it's usually the maths that wins out. So I'm glad you said that. I remember, specifically in the final, I was up against the awesome Sam Shah from New York. So it was the whole time difference going on. So they were asleep and I took, and when I woke up I was losing and then other people woke up. And I think I won by something stupid, like a few tens of votes at the end of it. And there was all this conversation that was going on about, Oh, should we vote for Sophie because she's a girl? Or should we vote for Sam because he's a teacher? And then there were these people going no, we're voting on the maths. That's all we're voting on. We're just voting on, do, which bit of maths do we like the most? And I was like, cool, that's good. And I think you're right. I think the, I will caveat that there was one, one specific one that I won. I was like, how? Because I thought the other person had done better maths. But we all have our favorite bits. So it's the, was it just that you really liked the topic that they picked and gone, Oh, that's really interesting. So I think there's two things. So my favorite ever post on all of them actually was Vicky Neale's knitted hedgehogs and her prime bracelets. And I remember seeing that I was up against that and going there is no way I'm going to win against knitted hedgehogs and pride bracelets that are very beautiful and wonderfully explained. And I was like, and I remember saying to my family, that's it. I'm out. I can't win. And I did win. And that was the one when Nira Chamberlain, who had, was the previous winner, phoned up and went, How did you win that one? And I was like, thanks. But we, but it was such a beautiful post. And it was so well written. And it had got knitted baby hedgehogs in it. I was just Oh. Vicky's always been amazing at outreach and communication. But so are you, Sophie. You're one of our favourite people to work with in terms of- Thank you, but I just don't have knitted baby hedgehogs. You don't. I don't think many of us do. No but the way she showed these prime patterns and these knitted bracelets, that's really good. What did you get out of doing the math off yourself? Other than bragging rights, obviously the bragging rights. The bragging rights were absolutely brilliant. So I think I got two things. Firstly, I've just met lots more awesome mathematicians who happen to seem to like talking about maths, and when you end up, I mean I started out in engineering, applied maths, I've ended up working in stats, but it's quite easy to get siloed in your little world of, This is the bit of maths I know. So I know Bayesian statisticians, and I know a few other statisticians. But actually, had I ever been introduced to the amazing world of prime numbers like Vicki sees them? No, I hadn't. And had I ever, and so actually realizing that you're not alone, that there is this world of other mathematicians out there going, look, there's like this really cool stuff. That was just lovely. I think the other thing I got out of it was a little bit more courage to go and say, hey, Baths is really cool. And actually get much more comfortable at communicating because honestly, putting those posts out at the start was just ha, this is my comfort zone, you couldn't even see it. To the point where Nira had to ask me twice to do it. I was so convinced that this was not me and not something I should do. So I did gain a lot of confidence in talking about maths, but the big thing was just meeting the other mathematicians and having, it was a, it was on Twitter when I did it, but it was, there was just lovely little conversations going on. And from that, I think that's the biggest thing I took from it. Do you think there's other things that people can do to develop the same sort of skills or is the math off the sort of unique niche of, Yes, this is it. This is great because you do a lot of other stuff as well. I do. I'm going to say that like you and I know that I think what the math off does that nobody else does that I've seen is just raise the voices of those people who might not have been heard of. So you're right that in the math off, there are some amazing, there was Matt Parker wasn't there in the first one. And, there are these big names that you look at and go, Ooh. Okay. But there are lots of other voices that people probably have never heard of, but had just been like quietly chirping away doing their own little thing. So I think the Math Off is unique in that it raises these voices of people going, you might not know of them, but they do cool maths and they like talking about it. I don't know anywhere else that really does that. There's the Talking Maths in Public conference. There's, the soapboxes. But I think that ability to reach literally across the world. That is unique. Can you do things without having to do it? Of course you can. I think it forced me so far out of my comfort zone, but I think it's like anything you just have to take a step and you just, I remember doing my first ever, master class and thinking that I'd never do another one because it was the most terrifying thing ever and a few years and I'm like, yeah, fine, turn up. Here we go. But I know what's gonna happen. I know the questions they're gonna ask. So it's just like getting going and I think there's so many opportunities to do outreach sometimes you don't realize how many there are and if you just put your hand up to any organization and say do you want to talk about math they're like oh yes come this way we need a speaker we want to talk at coming to school they're all there you just have to go, put your hand up and start. So here was the background for Sophie's first RI Masterclass. She'd been suggested as a speaker, but we've been led to believe that she'd done all loads of outreach and loads of workshops before. And it was only a week before that she said, this is my first time doing something. Can I have some help, please? So it's usually not that terrifying. Did you think it worked? It was fine. It was brilliant, Sophie. It was great. And you're one of our favorite speakers now. Yeah, no I'm glad the math off was was something that has given so much and you can get so much from it. Yeah, it is. As well as being so interesting to watch. Oh, it's just awesome. Like I say, it's bits of math that, like most people maybe not, so I did engineering, which has got some maths in, but it was very applied maths. And then I did a Masters of Applied Maths, so again, Fundamentally applied. There was a lot of integration and differentiation in my life up until the age of 24, like a lot of that. Some vectors, but because I did fluid dynamics, a lot of integration and differentiation. And so by the time I got to do Bayesian statistics, I'd seen some of math, but like most people, just bits of math. And so you don't know what you might have liked if you'd gone and found that other thing. I'm not Andrew Wiles. I didn't find out I wanted to solve Fermi's last theorem as a teenager. I like, just, that's not been in my life. So it is just that. What else do I want to read about? What other books do I want to pick up? What should I be looking at? And I remember, I think it's Tom Briggs, who used to say that, that maths, what unites all mathematicians is the love of puzzles. And I think when you go looking on that's what there's just lots and lots of puzzles that just need figuring out. So for anyone who's interested in maths, or as you said earlier, anyone who's not, anyone who's just interested in stuff the Big Internet Math Off is definitely something to go and check out. It's on the Aperiodical website. We will link to that in the comments. I'm going to finish off, Sophie, by asking you what the best thing is about you winning the Big Internet Math Off. Apart from the fact that I have a world title with no sporting prowess, I think my other favourite thing is that the previous winner was Nira Chamberlain. And he's a really nice chap, and we get on very well. But just to be able to say to Naira that he's ever so slightly boring, because he was interesting, and I am interesting has been really very enjoyable. Now he will tell you that he is, The original interesting which is better than being currently interesting. So there is that that's been very lovely from a fun point of view. But I think the other thing it's done is whenever you say to somebody, Oh, I'm the world's most interesting mathematician. The first thing is that they don't quite believe that's a thing. How can that be a thing? And the second thing is at that point it opens up a door And they want to talk to you. It stops being the, "oh, I'm a mathematician". They're like "I don't know what to say to you now. I'm just going to shy away". They're like, "you've won something. And it sounds like something I can talk to you about". So it's a door opener. And it's a door opener to getting people who might otherwise not want to talk to you actually talking to you. just break down those barriers. That's been really cool. I think we're both going to have to go away and look at this year's stock of new people and new exciting maths and see whether you'll be dethroned. And I will happily pass the mantle on to somebody else. It is absolutely somebody else's turn to take this and run with it. Thank you so much, Sophie. It's been lovely to hear about your experience. You're very welcome. Thank you for talking to me. --- That's all for this episode of the Talking Maths in Public podcast. Head to talkingmathsinpublic. uk slash podcast for more episodes to suggest your ideas for future segments and to find out more about the TMIP network. Hope you can join us again! Hannah Fry: The Talking Maths in Public podcast is presented and edited by Katie Steckles and funded by the International Centre for the Mathematical Sciences. The music is For Her by Lidérc on Pixabay.