When Assistant Professor of Mathematics Selvi Kara was a faculty member at the University of South Alabama in Mobile, Alabama, she started a math club with one of her colleagues to help middle school girls build confidence in their math skills.
She figured one way she could help the students was to have them hear from women mathematicians. So, she did what so many of us do and went to YouTube. There was only one problem.
“I couldn’t find anything,” she recalls. “There were a few really long videos about exceptional people, but nothing that showed everyday women mathematicians talking about their work or their path into math.”
Not one to turn away from a challenge, Kara reached out to Padi Fuster, a friend from grad school and a trusted collaborator.
“We were talking about how this is a big problem, not just for women mathematicians but mathematicians from underrepresented backgrounds, and at that moment, we knew we had to do something about it,” Kara says. From that conversation, Meet a Mathematician, which now features more than 70 videos, was born.
Soon after committing to the project, Kara attended the Math for All conference in New Orleans, where she and Padi recorded their first two interviews. A few weeks later, the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States, and no one knew when people would be able to gather for conferences or other events.
“It actually turned out to be a good thing for us because we had just thought about interviewing people at the conferences we attended, but then Zoom made it possible to interview anyone we wanted to,” Kara says.
Shortly after arriving at Bryn Mawr in 2023, Kara received an NSF Leaps Grant, part of which she’s used to help support the Meet a Mathematician project.
The grant has paid for two Bryn Mawr students to lend their skills to the project.
Economics major Paula Ferreira '27 has been translating video subtitles into Spanish since the fall of 2024, and math Ph.D. student Dalena Vien serves as the project's social media coordinator.
The grant is also helping to fund Bryn Mawr’s first-ever Meet a Mathematician Day.
Meet a Mathematician Day takes place on Saturday, Feb. 21, and is open to all Bi-Co community members. Co-organized by Kara and Haverford faculty member Julia Costacurta with a team of student organizers, the event centers on storytelling and what it means to find community in mathematical spaces.
The day will feature a keynote speech by Rosemarie Bongers from the University of California, Merced, short community video screenings, a panel, and opportunities for participants to share their own paths into math. The organizers are also curating a Meet a Mathematician video collection to share with the community and prospective students to give them an authentic sense of the Bi-Co math community.
