G4G's Virtual Celebration of Mind | March 2023

The Illustrated Field Diary of a Mathematical Naturalist

Mathematics is a jungle:  a jubilee of flowering plants and mysterious animals.  The mathematician is a naturalist, describing the behaviours of whatever she encounters on her tours.  With the advent of computers and modern technologies, the dispatches of the naturalist can now be illustrated in full colour.  In my own travels, I’ve collected some illustrations that I hope will surprise and delight you.  I’ll show you — in technicolour — some of the lesser-known antics of the inhabitants of the mathematical realm, including complex and rational numbers and the roots of polynomials.

Katherine E. Stange is a number theorist and cryptographer at the University of Colorado, Boulder.  She is in love with the rich structure and variation of number theory, with its potential to interact with geometry and illustration, and is fascinated by its relationship to human affairs through cryptography.  She is happiest simply wandering around taking field notes on the behaviour of mathematical flora and fauna.  Over the years, she has happily trailed elliptic curves and isogenies, quadratic forms, Kleinian groups, continued fractions, and quantum algorithms, to name a few.  In real life, she trails her two children, often on two wheels.  She can be found on the web at on her homepage and on her YouTube Channel.