Meet the Mathematics Outreach Committee: a conversation with Katie Chicot

Katie Chicot is a Senior Lecturer in Mathematics at The Open University and CEO of MathsWorldUK, a charity working to establish the UK's first interactive Mathematics Discovery Centre. Throughout her career, she has engaged with the public through various platforms - creating mathematical apps, producing educational videos for YouTube, and contributing as academic consultant to BBC Radio 4’s More or Less.

1. You became Chair of the Committee in January 2023 and are now halfway through your term. Could you tell us more about the activities and initiatives that your Committee oversees?

The Mathematics Outreach and Engagement Committee is a small group of busy mathematicians who are committed to making mathematics accessible and engaging across Europe. All members are actively engaged in communicating mathematics in their country and more widely. To maximize our impact as a committee we are focusing on:

• Building a community of those who are involved in maths engagement
• Raising the profile and status of maths engagement work
• Sharing good practice in outreach, evaluation and fundraising

To achieve the above, we established and run PopMath, a site where maths outreach events are publicised. In 2024 over 300 events were advertised on the site. As well as making events visible, Popmath allows maths communicators to see the range of maths engagement around Europe.

The Committee spreads the word about maths engagement activities through a number of social media channels. You can follow us on Facebook (@Mathematics in Europe), X and LinkedIn (@EmsOutreach).

2. The Committee recently established the Simon Norton Prize for Mathematics Outreach, which was awarded for the first time in 2024. What was the vision behind this prize, and what were your impressions of its first edition?

I was hugely pleased with the first year of the prize. The prize helps us to achieve all the Committee’s aims: sharing good practice, building a network of practitioners and raising the profile and status of mathematics engagement. We wanted to collect examples of best practice from around the globe and shine a spotlight on them. In its first year the prize received 33 entries featuring innovative examples of mathematics outreach from around the world. I loved reading the entries. There is such excellent high-impact work taking place with those who would otherwise miss out on maths. A number of highly commended entries are on our site.

Nina Gasking from Maison des Mathématiques et de l'Informatique (MMI) in Lyon was awarded first place at the Matrix x Imaginary conference this summer for her exhibition Dans ma cuisine.

I was impressed with the originality, reach, and mathematical depth of this project. Dans ma cuisine starts with the most familiar of environments, the home kitchen. With engaging hands-on activities, deep and fun mathematics is explored from Topology to Harmonic functions. The journey through the exhibition is structured in 4 parts : preparing (a recipe - algorithm, a plan - scheduling, guest list and dishes - database), cooking (mixing - entropy, oven - harmonic functions, putting cookies in a box - packing, spying on someones recipe - cryptography), sharing (a pizza - grabbing problem, a cake - necklace problem, a “galette” - probability and statistics) and chatting (interviews of 6 researchers that explain the maths or computer science behind an object found in a kitchen and a more meta link between their work and the process of cooking). Nina’s work will feature in an upcoming edition of the EMS magazine.

3. You have used many different approaches to share mathematics with the public. Which experiences stand out as particularly meaningful or surprising to you?

My approach to sharing mathematics has evolved over my career. Communicators have different strengths and interests, as do our audiences, and it is better to work sincerely in your own style. Starting out, I was focused on my performance, that is, focused on delivering high-energy, fun maths activities. I grew to preferring interactions where mathematics in the hands of the audience, as is the case in the brain teaser apps I developed. Most recently I have moved to influencing young people in group settings, alongside those who influence them most: their family, peers and teachers.

A meaningful, memorable change in my practice came as a result of the work of Carol Dweck on Mindsets and mathematics, and that of Jo Boaler. There had been oversights in how I had been viewing education. I set about embedding a growth mindset in my practice and my outlook. A growth mindset in education allowed me to better appreciate the invisible, psychological barriers to learning. It also allowed me to see how the presentation of maths as an elitist subject for geniuses was holding back a large proportion of learners. This energised me to work on the democratisation of mathematics.

4. As CEO of MathsWorldUK, you're leading the project to create a world-class interactive Mathematics Discovery Centre in the UK. The organization has already established MathsCity and organized numerous events and challenges at science fairs, and schools. Could you tell us about the value of interactive exhibits in communicating mathematics?

In Oct 2021, I led the launch of MathsCity, a 120 square meters visitor space in Leeds shopping centre. It has reached over 39,000 paying visitors to date. Independent evaluation in 2022 showed that young people overwhelmingly enjoyed visiting MathsCity, describing it as fun, cool and exciting, and they appreciated how applicable maths is. Strong enjoyment of maths increased from 22% to 30% post-visit with a greater impact on those from ethnic minorities, while those planning to take Maths A-level increased their interest in studying maths at university from 37% to 61%.

The purpose of using hands-on equipment in engagement with mathematics is many-fold. The objects are compelling. Visitors pick them up and have thereby surmounted the initial hurdle in maths of taking the first step. Maths is presented as play, and so the immediate feeling of being wrong or being humiliated is removed. These are objects to explore with not to be tested with. Visitors choose what to interact with and they can do so in groups. People can discuss solutions and work together. These are important aspects of learning which generally aren’t in the maths classroom.

Tweet Share