RESEARCH IN COVID TIMES
These are difficult times, it’s nothing new. We have had a year to understand that the world as we knew it has changed. Our world, the research, has changed too.
Mathematical research has never been an easy journey, but in addition, in 2020 we had to adapt to online teaching, coordinate the work of our groups from the distance and renounce attending any meeting or conference where we could share our work and learn from others.
Our strategy for adapting to changes
At Teamco we realized that it was time to rethink our methods of work and, why not, to profit from all the opportunities that the online world gives us for such an important part of our job: dissemination.
The Teamco video project began in the summer.
As all the events and conferences were cancelled, we thought that the best way to show our articles was to summarize them and make them attractive so that those interested could see in videos of less than 3 minutes what our research consists of.
In this way, we began to create our online «library» where, in addition to compiling our work, we presented ourselves to the world with an own brand image. That’s how our website was born. But we also needed to be connected to the mathematical community and find new channels of dissemination: A Youtube channel and a Twitter account.
Some little achievements
Today we can say that we feel satisfied with the reach we have had and that it is growing day by day: The average number of views of our ‘paper videos’ is 152 views, some of them exceeding 200 reproductions.
Specifically, the video based on the paper «A sequence of polynomials with optimal condition number» has reached over 360 visits in Youtube, thanks, in part, to the diffusion that the American Mathematical Society made of it in its Twitter account @amermathsoc. According to their words, our project is an «innovative use of animation to make mathematical research known».
Another society that has been publicly interested in our advances is the European Mathematical Society, whose account dedicated to communication @ems_press rewrote our publication on the article «A stable polynomial-time algorithm for the eigenpair problem» and called it «excellent video”
The global scientific reference publisher Springer also shared from its @SpringerMath account the video «The real polynomial eigenvalue problem is well conditioned on the average».
After looking for possible ways to make Teamco a platform for popularization of mathematics in general and not only a repository of our research, we decided to go on a new adventure working ‘About math and myths’. This is precisely the name of the article that we wrote for the science section ‘Café y Teoremas‘ in the renowned newspaper El país and whose promoter is the Institute of Mathematical Sciences ICMAT
As a complement to the article, we also made our video about Argos Panoptes in the myth of Zeus and Io and his protagonism on Smale’s 7th problem for the 21st century, which is still unsolved. To the date, it has been played over 1,000 times on Youtube. This animation had a very good reception and the recognition of spanish experts, projects and associations of classical culture.
Mathematics are everywhere
Results in spite of a pandemic
Attending to the visualizations, Teamco has been noticed by more than two thousand people, that is much more than we expected at the begin of this journey. We are very happy with the results we have achieved in just half a year and we work every day to continue finding ways to transfer our passion for mathematics to the world. We know the importance not only of research but also of dissemination to make people see the need for and benefits of investing in science.
