Clara Grima (Coria del Río, 1971) is a PhD in Mathematics, tenured professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Seville and researcher in computational geometry and graph theory. This scientific popularizer is mainly focused on the popularization of mathematics. She is president of the dissemination commission of the Royal Spanish Mathematical Society and the author of several books on the dissemination of mathematics, including: Up to infinity and beyond , May mathematics accompany you or Mathematics watch over your health .
He has received (among others) the COSCE 2017 award (awarded by the Confederation of Spanish Scientific Societies) for the dissemination of Science and the 2018 Special Prism Prize of the Jury.
Clara Grima participated in Homo curiosus with an entertaining talk accompanied by the documentary Magic Numbers . Also, we had a chance to talk to her and we ended up convinced that, as she always says, math is sexy!
One of the factors that, according to her, make mathematics have such a bad reputation is that many times it has not been taught from the proper perspective , that is: from logic, counted as a CSI-style game of deduction, as a series of chained reasonings that will lead us to solve a problem.
” Many young children, who have barely had contact with mathematics, already hate them “, reflects the researcher and disseminator, “They have already hated math from home!” Grima recounts how, the first time that, as a child, she managed to solve an equation, she gave a cry of joy, “How cool is this!”, She thought, and says that since then she has been fascinated with math and does not understand how it is so many people may hate them. “I am sad that there are many people who are missing something as beautiful as mathematics.”
Among the many fascinating applications of mathematics, the researcher tells us about a very curious one that we rarely think about: the geometry of clothing. When placing the pattern pieces that make up a garment, you try to waste as little fabric as possible , and this on an industrial scale is quite a challenge. “It is a complicated geometry problem and a lot is invested in solving it in the best possible way,” explains the scientist. “Those shoes you’re wearing, the jacket, the pants … are solutions to a geometric problem.”
Documentary: Magic Numbers
Led by Dr. Hannah Fry, we embark on a fascinating journey through the evolution of mathematics, from its philosophical origins to its status as a universal language and the foundation of all modern science. We will meet the great thinkers, whose advances have shaped the language of mathematics, and with it our understanding of the world . As we move from the past to the future, we will discover that this language is far from complete, and we will seek to answer from different points of view one of the deepest questions in mathematical thinking: Were they invented or simply discovered by humans?
