Kevin Houston (University of Leeds) – How to Tell the Public About Your Research Without Losing Them

Explaining your research to other specialists is hard enough. Explaining it to the general public -- people who may not share your enthusiasm for notation, definitions, and carefully stated lemmas -- can be even more challenging. Yet public engagement is an important part of academic life, and mathematicians now have many opportunities to share their work beyond the university.

In this talk I’ll discuss practical ways to tell the public about your research without losing them somewhere around the first equation. We’ll look at how to find the hook in your work, how to replace technical detail with intuition and examples, and how to turn abstract mathematics into something people can actually picture.

Ideally, by the end you’ll have a few techniques for explaining your research to non-mathematicians -- whether in a public lecture, an article, or when someone innocently asks what you do.