Andrea Patiño Contreras via Quanta Magazine
A Mathematician’s Unanticipated Journey Through the Physical World
Via Quanta Magazine:
The outline of Lauren Williams’s mathematical career was present very early on in her life.
“Ever since I was a kid, I’ve always loved patterns,” said Williams. “I enjoyed being given a sequence of numbers and having to find the pattern and predict the next number.”
But while many kids are enchanted by patterns, few end up following them as far, or to such unexpected places, as Williams has. As a professor at Harvard University—where she became only the second tenured woman mathematician in the university’s history—she has uncovered correspondences far more bewildering than anything she learned in grade school.
