Eugenia Cheng

Last updated

Eugenia Cheng
EugeniaCheng PhiBetaKappa EnLightningTalksChicago2016 (cropped).jpg
Cheng at the Phi Beta Kappa Society (En)Lightning Talks Chicago in 2016
Born
Eugenia Loh-Gene Cheng

(1976-08-01) 1 August 1976 (age 47) [1]
Hampshire, England
Education Roedean School
Alma mater University of Cambridge (BA, PhD)
Known for How to Bake Pi [2]
Scientific career
Fields Category theory
Popular mathematics
Institutions
Thesis Higher-dimensional category theory : opetopic foundations  (2002)
Doctoral advisor Martin Hyland [3]
Chinese name
Traditional Chinese 鄭樂雋 [4]
Simplified Chinese 郑乐隽
Website eugeniacheng.com

Eugenia Loh-Gene Cheng is a British mathematician, educator and concert pianist. Her mathematical interests include higher category theory, and as a pianist she specialises in lieder and art song. [5] She is also known for explaining mathematics to non-mathematicians to combat math phobia, often using analogies with food and baking. [6] Cheng is a scientist-in-residence at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. [7] [8] [9]

Contents

Early life and education

Cheng was born in Hampshire, England. She moved to Sussex at the age of one. [10] Her family is originally from Hong Kong. [4] Her interest in mathematics stemmed from a young age thanks largely to her mother who made mathematics a part of life. [10] [11]

Cheng attended Roedean School. [12] She studied the Mathematical Tripos at the University of Cambridge, where she was a student of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. Her postgraduate research was supervised by Martin Hyland. [3] [13] [14]

Career and research

As of 2020, Cheng is a scientist-in-residence at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she teaches mathematics to arts students. [7] [9] Cheng formerly held academic appointments at the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis, the University of Sheffield and the University of Chicago. [9]

She has published over a dozen research papers across several journals within her area of category theory. [15] Former doctoral students include Nick Gurski [3] and Thomas Cottrell. [16]

Mathematics and baking

Cheng's research interests are in category theory, which she has written about for a general audience by using analogies from baking. Her vision is to rid the world of mathematics phobia. In How to Bake Pi , published on May 5, 2015, [7] each chapter begins with a recipe for a dessert, to illustrate the commonalities in the methods and principles of mathematics and cooking. The book was well received [10] [17] [18] and has since been translated into French. [19]

Cheng has also written a number of papers with similar themes, such as On the perfect quantity of cream for a scone [20] and On the perfect size for a pizza. [21] Cheng has presented similar topics through YouTube in a light-hearted manner and has explored mathematics in other ways such as in her speech Mathematics and Lego: the untold story. [22]

Other writing

Cheng's second book, Beyond Infinity , explains set theory for lay audiences using analogies and anecdotes, including Cantor's diagonal argument and Zeno's paradoxes. [23] It was shortlisted for the 2017 Insight Investment Science Book Prize under the Royal Society Prizes for Science Books. [24]

She published her third book, The Art of Logic in an Illogical World, in 2018. [25] It explores arguments on real-world topics like same-sex marriage, white privilege, and police brutality in the United States using methods from logic, including explanations of Russell's paradox and Euclid's axioms on the way. [26]

Cheng writes a column called Everyday Math for The Wall Street Journal [27] on topics including probability theory, set theory, and Rubik's Cube solutions.

Music

Cheng is a pianist who specialises in lieder and art song. She was awarded the Sheila Mossman Memorial Award from the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music and was the first recipient of the Brighton and Hove Arts Council Award for the Musician of the Year. In Chicago, she gave a recital in the Pianoforte Chicago recital series; she performed Schwanengesang and Winterreise with Paul Geiger at Schubertiade Chicago in 2005 and 2006 respectively, and Die Schöne Müllerin with Ryan de Ryke at Schubertiade Chicago 2007. She performed lieder with tenor Nicholas Harkness in the Noontime Recital Series at the University of Chicago, the Salon Series at the Tower Club, and the Maxwell Recital Series, and she gave recitals for the Auxiliary Board Chapter of the Lyric Opera; she also performed La Traviata at the Oak Park Village Players. [28]

In 2013, Cheng founded the Liederstube as an oasis for art song in the Fine Arts Building, in downtown Chicago. The mission of the Liederstube is to present and enjoy classical music in an intimate and informal setting. The Liederstube is a Not For Profit 501(c)(3) organisation. [29]

Media appearances

Cheng has appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert making mille-feuille with Stephen Colbert in 2015 to demonstrate exponentials. [30] She was interviewed for the morning magazine show The Morning Shift on Chicago's Public Radio station WBEZ in 2017. [31] She was interviewed by Jim Al-Khalili for The Life Scientific on BBC Radio 4, first broadcast in January 2018. [32] She appeared on the WGBH podcast Innovation Hub in spring 2018. [33]

Books

Recognition

Cheng is included in a deck of playing cards featuring notable women mathematicians published by the Association of Women in Mathematics. [38]

Related Research Articles

Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics with the major subdisciplines of number theory, algebra, geometry, and analysis, respectively. There is no general consensus among mathematicians about a common definition for their academic discipline.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ingrid Daubechies</span> Belgian physicist and mathematician

Baroness Ingrid Daubechies is a Belgian-American physicist and mathematician. She is best known for her work with wavelets in image compression.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Karen Uhlenbeck</span> American mathematician

Karen Keskulla Uhlenbeck ForMemRS is an American mathematician and one of the founders of modern geometric analysis. She is a professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of Texas at Austin, where she held the Sid W. Richardson Foundation Regents Chair. She is currently a distinguished visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study and a visiting senior research scholar at Princeton University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Martin Hyland</span> British mathematician

(John) Martin Elliott Hyland is professor of mathematical logic at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of King's College, Cambridge. His interests include mathematical logic, category theory, and theoretical computer science.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford</span> Department of mathematics in University of Oxford

The Mathematical Institute is the mathematics department at the University of Oxford in England. It is one of the nine departments of the university's Mathematical, Physical and Life Sciences Division. The institute includes both pure and applied mathematics and is one of the largest mathematics departments in the United Kingdom with about 200 academic staff. It was ranked as the top mathematics department in the UK in the 2021 Research Excellence Framework. Research at the Mathematical Institute covers all branches of mathematical sciences ranging from, for example, algebra, number theory, and geometry to the application of mathematics to a wide range of fields including industry, finance, networks, and the brain. It has more than 850 undergraduates and 550 doctoral or masters students. The institute inhabits a purpose-built building between Somerville College and Green Templeton College on Woodstock Road, next to the Faculty of Philosophy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Frances Kirwan</span> British mathematician (born 1959)

Dame Frances Clare Kirwan, is a British mathematician, currently Savilian Professor of Geometry at the University of Oxford. Her fields of specialisation are algebraic and symplectic geometry.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sy Friedman</span> Austrian American mathematician

Sy-David Friedman is an American and Austrian mathematician and a (retired) professor of mathematics at the University of Vienna and the former director of the Kurt Gödel Research Center for Mathematical Logic. His main research interest lies in mathematical logic, in particular in set theory and recursion theory.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mathematical beauty</span> Aesthetic value of mathematics

Mathematical beauty is the aesthetic pleasure derived from the abstractness, purity, simplicity, depth or orderliness of mathematics. Mathematicians may express this pleasure by describing mathematics as beautiful or describe mathematics as an art form, or, at a minimum, as a creative activity.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jacob Lurie</span> American mathematician

Jacob Alexander Lurie is an American mathematician who is a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study. In 2014, Lurie received a MacArthur Fellowship.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tom Bridgeland</span> English mathematics professor (born 1973)

Thomas Andrew Bridgeland is a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Sheffield. He was a senior research fellow in 2011–2013 at All Souls College, Oxford and, since 2013, remains as a Quondam Fellow. He is most well-known for defining Bridgeland stability conditions on triangulated categories.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Louise Hay (mathematician)</span> French-born American mathematician

Louise Hay was a French-born American mathematician. Her work focused on recursively enumerable sets and computational complexity theory, which was influential with both Soviet and US mathematicians in the 1970s. When she was appointed head of the mathematics department at the University of Illinois at Chicago, she was the only woman to head a math department at a major research university in her era.

Mathematics is a field of study that investigates topics such as number, space, structure, and change.

Rodica Eugenia Simion was a Romanian-American mathematician. She was the Columbian School Professor of Mathematics at George Washington University. Her research concerned combinatorics: she was a pioneer in the study of permutation patterns, and an expert on noncrossing partitions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joel David Hamkins</span> American mathematician

Joel David Hamkins is an American mathematician and philosopher who is O'Hara Professor of Philosophy and Mathematics at the University of Notre Dame. He has made contributions in mathematical and philosophical logic, set theory and philosophy of set theory, in computability theory, and in group theory.

<i>How to Bake Pi</i>

How to Bake Pi is a popular mathematics book by Eugenia Cheng published in 2015. Each chapter of the book begins with a recipe for a dessert, to illustrate the methods and principles of mathematics and how they relate to one another. The book is an explanation of the foundations and architecture of category theory, a branch of mathematics that formalizes mathematical structure and its concepts.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Valeria de Paiva</span> Brazilian mathematician, logician, and computer scientist

Valeria Correa Vaz de Paiva is a Brazilian mathematician, logician, and computer scientist. Her work includes research on logical approaches to computation, especially using category theory, knowledge representation and natural language semantics, and functional programming with a focus on foundations and type theories.

Moon Duchin is an American mathematician who works as a professor at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. Her mathematical research concerns geometric topology, geometric group theory, and Teichmüller theory. She has done significant research on the mathematics of redistricting and gerrymandering, and founded a research group, MGGG Redistricting Lab, to advance these mathematical studies and their nonpartisan application in the real world of US politics. She is also interested in the cultural studies, philosophy, and history of science. Duchin is one of the core faculty members and serves as director of the Science, Technology, and Society program at Tufts.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Emily Riehl</span> American mathematician

Emily Riehl is an American mathematician who has contributed to higher category theory and homotopy theory. Much of her work, including her PhD thesis, concerns model structures and more recently the foundations of infinity-categories. She is the author of two textbooks and serves on the editorial boards of three journals.

<i>Beyond Infinity</i> (mathematics book) Popular mathematics book on infinity

Beyond Infinity : An Expedition to the Outer Limits of Mathematics is a popular mathematics book by Eugenia Cheng centered on concepts of infinity. It was published by Basic Books and by Profile Books in 2017, and in a paperback edition in 2018. It was shortlisted for the 2017 Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize.

References

  1. ↑ "England and Wales Birth Registration Index, 1837-2008," at https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QVWP-PM7V
  2. ↑ Eugenia, Cheng, How to bake pi : an edible exploration of the mathematics of mathematics, Gilbert, Tavia, ISBN   9781622316687, OCLC   898167298 (originally published in the UK as Cakes, Custard and Category Theory)
  3. 1 2 3 Eugenia Cheng at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  4. 1 2 "Pronunciation".
  5. ↑ "Eugenia Cheng, piano". cheng.staff.shef.ac.uk. Archived from the original on 18 September 2015. Retrieved 12 August 2015.
  6. ↑ Angier, Natalie (2 May 2010). "Eugenia Cheng Makes Math a Piece of Cake". The New York Times. Retrieved 26 September 2016.
  7. 1 2 3 Klinkenberg, Brendan (May 2015). "The Perfect Recipe". WIRED. p. 24.
  8. ↑ "SAIC – Eugenia Cheng – School of the Art Institute of Chicago". saic.edu. Retrieved 12 August 2015.
  9. 1 2 3 "About". Eugenia Cheng. Retrieved 28 July 2020.
  10. 1 2 3 "Cakes, Custard and Category Theory: Easy Recipes for Understanding Complex Maths, by Eugenia Cheng | Times Higher Education". timeshighereducation.co.uk. 4 June 2015. Retrieved 12 August 2015.
  11. ↑ Dr Eugenia Cheng. "Why I Don't Like Being a "Female Role Model" — Bright – Medium". Medium.com. Retrieved 12 August 2015.
  12. ↑ Faberij de Jonge, Jane (2013). "Profile: Dr Eugenia Cheng". Roedean Magazine: 36–37.
  13. ↑ Cheng, Eugenia Loh-Gene (2002). Higher-dimensional category theory : opetopic foundations (PDF). cheng.staff.shef.ac.uk (PhD thesis). University of Cambridge. OCLC   879393286. EThOS   uk.bl.ethos.597569. Archived from the original (PDF) on 31 October 2008.
  14. ↑ Cheng, Eugenia; Hyland, Martin; Power, John (2003). "Pseudo-distributive Laws". Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science . 83: 227–245. doi: 10.1016/S1571-0661(03)50012-3 . ISSN   1571-0661.
  15. ↑ "Research papers". cheng.staff.shef.ac.uk. Archived from the original on 21 October 2015. Retrieved 12 August 2015.
  16. ↑ Cottrell, Thomas (2014). Comparing algebraic and non-algebraic foundations of n-category theory. etheses.whiterose.ac.uk (PhD thesis). University of Sheffield. OCLC   879388784. EThOS   uk.bl.ethos.595261. Lock-green.svg
  17. ↑ "'How to Bake Pi: An Edible Exploration of the Mathematics of Mathematics' by Eugenia Cheng". Kirkus Reviews . 15 March 2015. Retrieved 26 September 2016.
  18. ↑ Bellos, Alex (12 June 2015). "'How to Bake Pi,' by Eugenia Cheng". The New York Times . New York City. Retrieved 13 June 2015.
  19. ↑ Cheng, Eugenia (2016). Comment cuire un 9. Translated by Courcelle, Olivier. Flammarion. ISBN   978-2-08-138213-8.
  20. ↑ Eugenia Cheng. "On the perfect quantity of cream for a scone" (PDF). Cheng.staff.shef.ac.uk. Archived from the original (PDF) on 27 April 2018. Retrieved 24 January 2018.
  21. ↑ Eugenia Cheng. "On the perfect size for a pizza" (PDF). Cheng.staff.shef.ac.uk. Archived from the original (PDF) on 31 October 2017. Retrieved 24 January 2018.
  22. ↑ Eugenia Cheng. "Mathematics and Lego : the untold story" (PDF). Cheng.staff.shef.ac.uk. Archived from the original (PDF) on 4 March 2016. Retrieved 24 January 2018.
  23. ↑ "Review: Beyond Infinity: An Expedition to the Outer Limits of Mathematics | EMS". euro-math-soc.eu. Retrieved 13 October 2018.
  24. ↑ "2017 Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize | Royal Society". royalsociety.org. Retrieved 13 October 2018.
  25. ↑ Cheng, Eugenia (16 January 2018). The Art of Logic in an Illogical World. ISBN   9781541672482.
  26. ↑ Guest, Katy (19 July 2018). "The Art of Logic by Eugenia Cheng review – the need for good arguments". The Guardian. Retrieved 13 October 2018.
  27. ↑ "Eugenia Cheng - News, Articles, biography, Photos". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 13 October 2018.
  28. ↑ "Eugenia Cheng, piano". cheng.staff.shef.ac.uk. Archived from the original on 18 September 2015. Retrieved 4 November 2015.
  29. ↑ "home". Liederstube.wix.com. Retrieved 4 November 2015.
  30. ↑ The Late Show with Stephen Colbert (5 November 2015), Dr. Eugenia Cheng Gives Paula Deen A Run For Her Butter , retrieved 2 March 2017
  31. ↑ "Eugenia Cheng: Math Is About Discovery". WBEZ. Retrieved 13 October 2018.
  32. ↑ Al-Khalili, Jim (2018). "Eugenia Cheng on the mathematics of mathematics". London: BBC.
  33. ↑ "Recent Entries". Innovation Hub | WGBH.org Blogs. Retrieved 13 October 2018.
  34. ↑ "How to Bake Pi". Profile Books. Archived from the original on 3 November 2019. Retrieved 3 November 2019.
  35. ↑ O'Neil, Cathy (4 September 2020). "Want a Better Way to Think About Gender? Use Math" . The New York Times . Archived from the original on 8 September 2020. Retrieved 6 May 2024.
  36. ↑ Guest, Katy (22 July 2020). "x + y by Eugenia Cheng review – an end to the gender wars?" . The Guardian . Archived from the original on 6 May 2024. Retrieved 6 May 2024.
  37. ↑ Knudson, Christina P. (10 May 2021). "Reviews of books and teaching materials - x + y: A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender". The American Statistician . 75 (2). American Statistical Association: 232–233. doi:10.1080/00031305.2021.1907998.
  38. ↑ "Mathematicians of EvenQuads Deck 1". awm-math.org. Retrieved 18 June 2022.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.