At the breakfast, co-hosted with the KCL Women in STEM (WiSTEM) Society, staff and students from across the Faculty were invited to meet, network, and celebrate International Women’s Day.

The exhibition, which opened in Berlin in July 2016 and is touring Europe, stems from the observation that women find it difficult to embrace a career in the mathematical academic world, and the disparity between the proportions of men and women among professional mathematicians is still shamefully large. The exhibition offers a glimpse into the world of mathematics through photographs (by Noel Tovia Matoff) and excerpts of interviews (by Sylvie Paycha and Sara Azzali) with 13 women mathematicians throughout Europe. You can find out more on the exhibition website.

In the main event of the day, Professor Ulrike Tillmann gave a talk entitled ‘Surfaces and Strings’. Professor Tillmann is an algebraic topologist at the University of Oxford. She is known for her work on mapping class groups of surfaces, and for using topological field theory developed from the work of Witten and others to tackle conjectures of Mumford on the homology of moduli spaces of Riemann surfaces. She has received national and international prizes for her work.

Many students and staff remained in the Great Hall long after the lecture to network, talk to Professor Tillmann and view the exhibition. Please follow to the link to view the photos from the Women in Mathematics 2017 day.