Early exposure to math is not like the math that you get to see later on.
It would be sort of like taking an athletics class where somebody spent a year teaching
you how to dribble, first with the left hand and then the right hand.
And then the next year, they said, now we're going to do something different.
It's called layups.
And you would just practice these things one drill at a time without knowing why.
And it wouldn't be until you got to college that you actually got to play a game and go,
that's what basketball is.
I'm a mathematician.
I just love doing math.
It's what I want to do all the time.
Mathematics is a way of trying to understand the patterns that underlie ideas and that
underlie physical phenomena.
Most people are really surprised that art has anything to do with math.
I teach a course on projective geometry.
And projective really means like you're projecting a three-dimensional world onto a canvas.
There are certain things that change when you project stuff.
So like if you think about the railroad tracks going back into the distance, in the real
world those tracks are spaced evenly, but in the pictures they're not.
So there's some things that change, but there are some things that stay the same.
Like if you have a line in the real world, its image on the canvas is still a line.
And so there's certain geometrical aspects that we know are preserved, and so that's
what we look at, what is preserved and what's not preserved.
I tend to be a very ecologically minded, sustainable person.
This year my family only put nine trash cans at the curb for the entire year.
Other people see that as being sustainable and I think of that as figuring out a problem
to work on and then figuring out how to solve it and have fun solving that problem.
We live on a finite earth, right?
It's a big earth, but it's a finite earth, so we can't throw anything away because there
is no away.
Life is fun.
Yeah, I mean everything should be entertaining, right?
Saving the planet should be fun, riding your bicycle is incredibly fun.
Doing math is fun, and I want students to be able to see that.
At the beginning my students are so scared, but after they've been here a while they become
my colleagues, and I love that transition, and I think the students do too.
About half of the papers that I've written I've co-published with students.
I love working with students on my research because they ask questions that trained mathematicians
wouldn't think to ask, and that often lead in really, really good productive directions.
They take my research in ways that other people wouldn't have expected.
You'd think that they would be scared of the math and think the art is really cool, but
most people had math last year, and they haven't had art since sixth grade, so they are actually
terrified of drawing.
What happens is they go from pictures that are just really awful stick figures to things
that they are just incredibly proud of that are really amazingly good.
I've only been here 25 years, but so far I really like it, and I'm probably going to
stay.
I'm Annalise Sikrenel, and I'm a professor of mathematics here at Franklin and Marshall
College.
