Marianne Freiberger is Editor of Plus. She joined Plus in 2005 after doing a PhD and then a three year postdoc at Queen Mary, University of London. As a researcher she worked in complex dynamics, the area of pure maths that has given us the Mandelbrot set. In the world of maths communication she has been Editor-in-Chief of the Mathscareers website, given presentations to mathematicians about how to communicate their work to a wider audience, and to journalists about how to deal with maths in the media. She has been a TEDx speaker and an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2010.
Together with Rachel Thomas, Marianne has co-authored several popular maths books including Numericon: A journey through the hidden lives of numbers and Understanding numbers, and were editors on the book 50: visions of mathematics. They were Science Editors for the Discovery+ documentary series Universe Unravelled about the work of the Stephen Hawking Centre for Theoretical Cosmology.
In October 2022 Marianne and Rachel received a SPI-M-O Award for Modelling and Data Support (SAMDS) from the UK's Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies. This award recognised their work with the JUNIPER modelling consortium to provide a wide audience (including public, press, policy makers and government) with clear and accessible explanations of some of the maths that was vital in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Hannah Fry will join us at the University of Cambridge in January as Cambridge's first Professor for the Public Understanding of Mathematics!
Physicists have figured out how we might detect hypothetical boson stars. If we do, then this would count as a major step towards solving the riddle of dark matter,
Frederick Manners has won a prestigious EMS Prize at the European Congress of Mathematics 2024 for, among other things, a problem involving pyjamas.
Tom Hutchcroft has won a prestigious EMS Prize at the European Congress of Mathematics 2024, for work on mathematical models that can help us figure out phase transitions.
Richard Montgomery has won a prestigious EMS Prize at the European Congress of Mathematics 2024 for work on objects so ubiquitous in everyday life it's easy to forget they're mathematical: networks.
This article describes how you can describe the entire universe of Riemann tori (surfaces that look like dooughnuts) in one go.
A Riemann torus is a surface that looks like a doughnut. This articles explored how you might tell Riemann tori apart.
How many different surfaces are there? The question seems impossible to answer, but mathematicians have a way of dealing with the multitude. Follow us on a journey into the world of moduli spaces.
With bird flu spreading through cattle herds in the US and infecting humans, the diseases poses a severe threat to wild life, poultry and also people. What can mathematical modelling do to help?
The age of Big Data poses a risk to our privacy as even anonymised data can sometimes be linked to individuals. Differential privacy provides a way of protecting sensitive information even when some of it is made public.
How does artificial intelligence manage to produce reliable outputs? Stochastic gradient descent has the answer!
The advent of artificial intelligence poses new threats to the privacy of our personal data. We explore the challenges and a way to address them.
