Workshops for high school students
Inspired by the success of the workshops as part of the Millennium Event, I designed together with a student various workshops for schoolchildren from middle school upwards. We now offer these workshops regularly as open workshops or as individual appointments for school classes. We are also in the process of expanding the offer and implementing new topics as workshops. Our goal is to show the students that "real" mathematics works very differently than the calculations they usually do at school. That's why the workshops are designed to be interactive so that the students can try things out, discover things and develop solutions for themselves.
Girl's Day
Over the last years, I co-organized a workshop for the Girl's Day. During the 4 hours of the workshop for female high school students, we showed the girls how mathematicians work at university and what "math" is in contrast to "calculations" usually done at school. Topics of the last years were Rubics cube (2014), wallpaper groups (2018, 2019), the Euler characteristic (2021), Origami (the folding version - 2022) and Dobble and Projective Geometry (2023).
Millennium Celebration of the Poincaré Conjecture (Summer 2022)
In 2000, the Clay Foundation declared 7 open complex mathematical problems as the Millennium Prize Problems, a solution to each of these claimed problems is accompanied by an award of 1 million US dollars. The Research Station Geometry+Dynamics together with the Excellence Cluster STRUCTURES took part in a German-wide celebration in honor of these problems. Heidelberg was concerned with the Poincaré conjecture, the only solved Millennium Prize Problem so far. I was head of the organization committe in Heidelberg, where we had public talks and workshops for high school students. All information are available on our webpage and on our poster.
Public outreach talks
- Workshop at the Mathematik Informatik Station (May 2023)
Title: "Tapetenmustergruppen" (Webpage) - Akademische Mittagspause (May 2023)
Title: "Tapetenmustergruppen - die Struktur hinter wunderschönen Mustern" (Video) - Akademische Mittagspause, together with Nicolaus Treib and Florian Stecker, (2016)
Title: "Wie Mathematiker Billard spielen" (Video) - Akademische Mittagspause, together with Nicolaus Treib and Florian Stecker, (2016)
Title: "Der Zauberwürfel entzaubert" (Video)
Winter projects at the Mathematikon
Together with HEGL, we initiated community projects in the winter semester, which were then exhibited in the foyer of the Mathematikon. In 2021/22 we built a Siepinksi Christmas tree together. In 2022/23 a large fractal snowflake was designed together. Anyone who was interested could take part.
Heidelberg Life Science Lab
Since 2014 I am a mentor of the Math group of the Heidelberger Life Science Lab. The Heidelberger Life Science Lab was founded by the Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum (German Cancer Reseach Center) to foster high school students who are particularly interested in Math and life sciences. In our group we usually three mentors and between 10 to 16 students (depending on the year). This year (October 2022 - July 2023) we are working on wallpaper groups and symmetries. In the last years we concerned ourselves with group theory applied to the Rubik's Cube (2014/15 and 2018/19), game theory (2015/16), some proofs from the "Book of proofs" (2016/17), cryptography (2017/18), non-Euclidean geometry (2019/20), knot theory and invariants (2020/21) and number theory (2021/22).
Upstream Program
Oir department hosts the Upstream mentoring program for women in mathematics. It is open to all women interested in Math, from high school students to professors, and includes not only mentoring but also many activities (workshops, excursions) and a monthly lunch break to get to know each other, plan more activities and ask questions. If you are interested, feel free to come over!