On Saturday, Feb. 24, the 14th Symposium for Women and Gender Minorities in Mathematics in Southern California (WiMSoCal) took place at Pomona College’s Estella Laboratory. The event was held in hopes of creating a supportive environment for women and gender-nonconforming people to explore issues surrounding marginalized identities in mathematics.
Ami Radunskaya, Lingurn H. Burkhead professor of mathematics at Pomona and one of the founders of WiMSoCal, explained that the event’s purpose was to foster a supportive community and build relationships in the field for participants.
The annual symposium was started by Radunskaya and Cymra Haskell, a professor of mathematics at USC. The two have been working together for over a decade, with their first event occurring in 2009 at Loyola Marymount University, where they hosted a social gathering for like-minded women in mathematics. Since then, they have begun to run the WiMSoCal conference.
“It was very grassroots,” Radunskaya said. “We do our funding and we do everything ourselves. And it’s all local and it’s just for fun.”
The symposium featured many opportunities for mathematicians and people seeking a career in math to network among peers and faculty in a collaborative environment. Activities included a game where attendees were given cards with various shapes and colors and were tasked with finding the other attendees with matching cards, along with a breakout session where those who participated wrote haikus.
Ella Young SC ’24 highlighted the importance of events like this one in offering a space for less formal interactions within the field.
“You get to connect with other people socially,” Young said. “It makes the overall environment of math less of that … rigorous competitive [type].”
The event kicked off with a welcome talk from the organizers in the John C. Argue Auditorium where organizers explained the event’s itinerary and emphasized its goal of providing a platform for women and gender-nonconforming mathematicians to network.
This led into the first of two sessions of research talks, featuring 16 student presenters split into four parallel sessions. The talks ran concurrently, allowing attendees the option of attending one of four sessions depending on their interests.
Each presenter shared their respective research or project and was given an opportunity to receive feedback. Those giving these research talks had to register before the event and submit an abstract about what they wanted to present.
Tian Dong HM ’24 spoke about her thesis, which focuses on how opinions change over time depending on the polarization of one’s opinion and their interactions with others. Specifically, she is working on finding an opinion dynamics model — a model that represents how opinions spread and change within a group of individuals using differential equations — to represent the changes within the community of individuals.
“I had a couple of professors encourage me to [speak],” Dong said. “It just seemed like it would be fun and also cool to share and [I could] use other people to get feedback on my thesis.”
At the event, there were many talks about various sectors of math, from opinion dynamics like Dong’s to pure mathematical research. Dong noticed that this was something that was special about the event, explaining the importance of an event like WiMSoCal in creating connections with other researchers in the community of women and gender-nonconforming people.
“I think having a lot of people [from] very different backgrounds and approaches to research is very helpful for seeing different perspectives,” Dong said. “It’s important to hear voices from this community.”
Radunskaya echoed Dong’s emphasis on the importance of an event such as WiMSoCal in creating community among minority groups in the field of math.
“The data shows that women are very much underrepresented in mathematics [on] the professional level and so we think it’s important to support each other,” Radunskaya said. “It’s important to have a friendly space where you can meet other people who are into math.”
Young noted that as a math major, most of her math classes consist of mostly men and noted the importance of events such as this one.
“It can be kind of isolating, especially since I have experienced misogyny in the math classroom,” Young said. “So I wanted to be able to kind of network with other mathematicians of, like, women or gender minorities.”
Young further emphasized the need for spaces in the math field for women and gender-nonconforming people.
“It’s also emblematic of, why do we have to have this kind of event in the first place?” Young said. “Because if we didn’t specify [this space] for women and gender minorities, you could anticipate an extremely different imbalance to the opposite direction.”
Apart from identity, some found the symposium important in highlighting the field of math within STEM. Natalie Burton SC ’24 noted that in a STEM community, oftentimes math is left out of the conversation.
“I feel like a lot of science students and professors don’t like math … [a lot of the times] they’re not really promoting math,” Burton said. “So I really like being here [where] everyone’s super excited about math.
Christina Edholm, assistant professor in mathematics at Scripps College and an organizer of the event, noted that the talk gave people an opportunity to spotlight their research to such a supportive community.
“I think the hope was … to kind of bring back this event that fosters community and openness and really supporting everybody and kind of having a celebration of both research and people,” Edholm said.
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