Ali K. Uncu

“Lange Nacht der Forschung” (Long Night of Research) is an Austria-wide inspiring bi-annual event that showcases the world of science and innovation to the public. Each institute and university holds events for one night after work hours all across Austria to meet the public and talk about their research. What questions are they asking? How is the research being conducted? Why is it important/interesting? What led the researchers to where they are? It is a celebration of knowledge. It bridges researchers and the broader community. It allows researchers to get out of their offices and labs for once and engage with people of all ages.

The Austrian Academy of Sciences asked the Johann Radon Institute’s contribution to this event. We were asked if we would like to spend one evening in Vienna at the Academy’s historic building and talk about some mathematics of our choice. I figured that this would be my last chance to join this event before my project ends at the Radon Institute and I volunteered to be a part of it. It was highly rewarding.

Outreach of mathematics is already difficult even when the knowledge level is given. Even between mathematicians, it is hard to understand the research of one another. Mathematicians specialize in difficult problems and end up joining the clique that is interested in similar questions. Each clique, over time, creates its own mathematics vocabulary, definitions, known results, lectures, and books; further making it hard to have a casual conversation on these abstract topics with history.

I would have loved to talk about integer partitions and q-series, but I made the stylistic choice and prepared some material on real quantifier elimination (what I have been working on in the project at the University of Bath). It offers more direct applications to everyday life, and I figured that would be easier to connect to people. Autonomous vehicles are a hot topic these days and the question “Computer, make sure these vehicle trajectories do not intersect” to avoid any collusion is a quantifier elimination problem when it is written in mathematics language.

Johann Radon Institute for Computational and Applied Mathematics room at this event was diverse and lots of fun. Other than my desk, we had rigidity theory, machine learning, cryptography and prime numbers, and various medical imaging exhibits.

I chatted not only with the locals but also with some tourists visiting Vienna. It was eye-opening. It barely felt like I was talking about mathematics. It was so rare that someone asked me how we were achieving what I said was the end goal (collision avoidance). People only wanted to see some faces and hear their enthusiasm for the work that they were doing. I should remember this for the next time I try to explain my research to my family. They don’t want details, they just want to know that I am enthusiastic about what I do. Anyway, it wasn’t all empty PR. We got a visit from the University of Vienna Mathematics student cohort. They asked me many technical questions. It was only then I launched GeoGebra Discovery and Maple and played with some examples I prepared beforehand.