G4G's Virtual Celebration of Mind | August 2023

From Bourbaki to “Look-and-See”

A push by a handful of influential mathematicians in the 1930s almost completely eliminated any geometric intuition from mathematics. Fortunately, that goal didn’t succeed, and, in the 1970s, various outlets began regularly publishing short articles entitled “proofs without words.” In the past two decades, I have come to have a deep appreciation for these visual proofs and their role in mathematical understanding. We’ll explore some of my favorite proofs without words—ones that I think should be encountered by every math enthusiast—and make sense of them by adding a few words and seeing the classic visualizations in animated form.

Érika Roldan’s mathematical research includes gamification and visualization technology. For almost twenty years, she has been implementing and developing outreach and educational projects in México, the USA 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 and co-founded Matemorfosis, and Music-Math. She is currently leading the research group Stochastic Topology and its applications at the Max Planck Institute MiS and is also affiliated with the Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence at Universität Leipzig, where she leads research projects on Computational Complexity, Educational technology, and Learning Analytics.  More info: www.erikaroldan.net