Talk By Diana Davis: “Dance Your Dissertation”, Tuesday July 23

Diana Davis’s video won the Physics and Math category of the 2012 international “Dance Your PhD” competition, sponsored by American Association for the Advancement of Science and TED. The contest invites graduate students to submit videos that explain their dissertations through dance, aimed at non-scientist audiences. Her video, which shows a single dancer moving across a colored pentagonal surface, subsequently “went viral” in the mathematics community, and has been shown at talks and conferences around the world.

Diana Davis received a PhD in 2013 from the mathematics department at Brown University, where she studied geometry and dynamics. She is passionate about teaching and learning mathematics, especially through drawing geometric pictures and through building three-dimensional geometric objects. This fall, she will begin a postdoc at Northwestern University.