FACETS 2025: Exploring themes and careers in mathematics
May 27, 2025 | Bharti Dharapuram
FACETS 2025, IMSc's annual mathematics outreach programme, saw over a hundred partcipants who heard talks on pure and applied mathematics and discussed higher education and career opportunities.
IMSc organised FACETS, its yearly mathematics outreach program on 22 and 23 May 2025. Over a hundred undergraduate and postgraduate students attended the event hearing talks on topics in pure and applied mathematics. The event was coordinated by Sushmita Venugopalan from The Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai.
In a hands-on session in geometry, Vijay Ravikumar from Azim Premji University, Bangalore led an interactive session on counting geodesics on surfaces. Participants used paper, string and scissors to create three-dimensional shapes and trace geodesics on them. Arvind Ayyer from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore gave a board talk on partitions, giving various proofs of Euler’s Partition Theorem. He walked the participants through the intuition behind each of the proofs, illustrating the different approaches of looking at the problem. Sitabhra Sinha from The Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai spoke about the principles of physics underlying biology using the example of coupled oscillators. He presented various cases where waves give rise to patterns in nature and human society.
Mohan Ravichandran from Zessta Software Services, Hyderabad spoke about the various opportunities for mathematics graduates in software development. He spoke about his personal journey and current work in industry at the intersection of data science and machine learning. Rajendran Narayanan from Azim Premji University spoke about analysing large public datasets to obtain insights into the implementation of government policies. He presented a case study to highlight how research can help us identify problems and contribute to advocacy.
The program concluded with a panel discussion where participants interacted with the speakers about higher education and careers in mathematics. Audience questions ranged from clearing competitive exams, studying abroad, improving teaching skills, the importance of a PhD in a teaching career, and balancing teaching and research with other interests.
