Comment by dofm
7 hours ago
She was a professor in the mathematics of cities (applied spatial mathematics) before that — in her early thirties.
She is an expert in applied mathematics (president of the applicable UK institute, actually) and this is absolutely of a piece with that; it's not some wishy-washy thing that she does.
Public understanding of science has proved to be a valuable field, and I think this will be important. Her Oxford opposite number, arguably, is Marcus du Sautoy, who has the Public Understanding of Science professorship that was originally created for Dawkins.
> She was a professor in the mathematics of cities (applied spatial mathematics) before that — in her early thirties.
But, that was not at Cambridge, which is what the original post by vgivanovic claimed, right? It was at University College London.
> Public understanding of science has proved to be a valuable field,
I never contested that, assuming that it is done responsibly and well. But that field, as well as a large proportion of her activities and work, as well as the title "Professor of the Public Understanding of Mathematics", seem softer and less hardcore than many other titles for professors regarding mathematics.
A field can be both soft and valuable, assuming the field is handled responsibly and well.
> president of the applicable UK institute
A president is not primarily a researcher, right? More about external relations, strategy, management, etc., as far as I know. Mentioning her being a president weakens your argument, and strengthens my argument, as far as I can tell. There are other former presidents of that institute that likewise have had a more educational focus instead of hardcore research focus, like Celia Hoyles as far as I can tell.
> She is an expert in applied mathematics
She does have a PhD, but apart from that, her research work has been more focused on softer topics as far as I can tell. Do you know of any work after her PhD that was more hardcore research? The publications I found were more soft, like "The Indisputable Existence of Santa Claus (2015)", a few years after completing her PhD.
Do you know if she has been employed in the private sector regarding what one could perceive as more hardcore research or engineering? She seems to be very hardworking and active, and have written a lot of books and worked with a lot of movies and other media, apart from being a president of an institute and being a professor, so it would be impressive if she also found both time and energy for hardcore research. I don't know if other professors would be able to take on that many challenges at once. She cannot be described as lazy by any means.
I have no idea why you have this weird axe to grind. Yes she has done research
https://www.nature.com/articles/srep01303
https://www.thelancet.com/article/S1473-3099(20)30457-6/full...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-03164-7
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.16.20023754v...
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/european-journal-of-...
Etc etc. That’s papers in Nature, The Lancet, The European Journal of Applied Mathematics etc. If you actually searched you would have found tons and tons of papers and citations. She clearly does “hardcore” research by any reasonable definition as you would expect given she has been for some time a professor at UCL which is a top-tier university.
Between 2017 and 2021 she also had two children, cervical cancer, a radical hysterectomy, lymphoedema and reconstructive surgery for that.
She is a properly impressive person who warrants no shade, but it never surprises me to see it.
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The medrxix example is a preprint, not peer-reviewed. Why did you not point that out? And her name appears second-to-last in the authors' list.
The Lancet example is some BBC stuff, and has her name appear down near the end of the authors' list. And the contributors' section does not seem to list her as a primary author, she did not design the analysis, nor develop the model.
The Nature example indicates in the Author Contributions section that she only did some additional contributions, nothing core. Her name is not near the start of the long list of authors.
That leaves the 2 papers from 2013 and 2016, closer to the beginning of her career. Her name does not appear first in either, but she was presumably a major author in both.
The spatio-temporal aspects of some of the papers seem neat.
There is an annoyingly large amount of statistics involved, and statistics is again one of those fields that do not always have the best of reputations ("lies, damned lies, and statistics"). In part because statistical models, results, etc. can be difficult to verify the correctness of. Unlike for instance some kinds of experimental physics, where if something is wrong, the experiment can easily fail in many cases. Or in multiple kinds of engineering, where if something is wrong, there can be very practical consequences, and those consequences are often encountered sooner rather than later. In my experience, physicists are often better than mathematicians at mathematics, in part because phycisists cannot as often bullshit their way through things, which filters people and also lets phycisists test, train and improve themselves. Ironically, proper statistics is in some ways harder because of this than some other disciplines, because statistics requires greater honesty, discipline and competence due to statistics often being difficult to verify correctness of.
Also consider stuff like the reproducibility crisis and various scandals:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42284173
Nothing among the papers you listed that really seems to push the boundaries of science. A lot of models, statistics, data gathering and such.
Do you have more papers? With this admittedly tiny selection, excluding the preprint stuff, she seems to have done more research work earlier in her career, and none of the examples list her as the first author.
I actually have a worse impression of her now that I have seen the papers you listed. Ignoring the preprint paper you listed.
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