A straight-As maths student who identified with the kids who ‘didn’t get it’, Dr Tai-Danae Bradley is passionate about education. She shares her journey from a life-changing calculus class to becoming a mathematician and science communicator.
Bradley vividly remembers the divide in maths class between the students who “got it” and those who didn’t. A keen learner with a thing for numbers, Bradley would score straight A’s in mathematics, though she admits to not really engaging with the “dry and abstract” calculations and exercises. “I thought it was the worst – like, who wants to compute the friction constant of a brick sliding down a ramp? This is terrible,” she laughs.
By the time she made it to college, Bradley was part of the women’s basketball team and had planned on pursuing athletics as a career. But an unexpected “light bulb and sparks” moment in a second-year calculus class changed the course of her life.
Her early calculus classes at the City College of New York (CCNY), in Harlem were extremely dull (she jokes that she’s permanently redacted them from her brain), but thanks to her Calculus 3 professor, Bradley finally understood the concepts behind the dry, procedural maths that she’d been doing for years – and she wanted to learn more. She quit the basketball team; she had found her purpose.
Now a research mathematician at SandboxAQ, a quantum technology start-up that spun out of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, Bradley studies mathematics inspired by quantum physics. She’s also a visiting professor of mathematics at the Math3ma Institute at Master’s University in Santa Clarita, California.
Between her day jobs, Bradley is a prolific science communicator and blogger, with a video series and podcast among the many projects she’s running to help educate audiences about maths. While she’s always been good at maths, Bradley identifies with the ‘bad-at-math’ kids because of how obtuse the underlying concepts or reasoning can be. She’s now committed to closing the gap between those who love maths and those who are intimidated by it.
Igniting a love for sci-comm
Bradley’s professor didn’t just inspire her passion for physics and maths – he also ignited her love of science communication. As a teacher, he would make connections between “esoteric-looking math symbols” and the real world, bringing seemingly-abstract ideas to life. His empathy also inspired her: he would emphasize that it wasn’t about being fast or intelligent, or having a particular gene or wiring in your brain. Anyone, he said, can grasp these concepts if they are explained in the right way. It was a revolutionary concept, says Bradley, especially in maths.
Alongside her newfound appreciation for the mechanisms behind mathematics came an unexpected emotion: frustration. Bradley says she felt cheated – not just on her own behalf, but for the countless other kids who, like her, believed that they were naturally bad at maths. This experience would inspire Bradley to launch her blog, Math3ma, in 2015, which discusses complex concepts in mathematics in easy-to-understand language.
She’s also co-authored a textbook on topology and category theory and collaborated with PBS on their Infinite Series, where she shared her fascination with mathematical concepts such as infinity. Most recently, she’s launched a new podcast exploring quantum physics, called fAQ, with her SandboxAQ teammate Adam Green.
For Bradley, quantum physics is a new sci-comm challenge – neither she nor Green are experts in quantum physics, and she admits that she’s not used to teaching as a non-expert. Still, she enjoys the new way of connecting with her audience. “I like to learn and help people learn by talking through ideas together,” she says. “It feels a little bit less intimidating than sitting in, for example, a formal university setting with the pressure of exams, especially when you’re trying to learn complex ideas.”
Bringing everyone to the table
For Bradley, science communication is about bringing as many people to the table as possible. “I cannot fathom why a researcher would want to exclude others from understanding what they do,” she says.
Her PhD research, which she completed at the Graduate Center at City University of New York (CUNY) in 2020, focused on the interactions between quantum physics, an area of artificial intelligence (AI) called machine intelligence, and category theory – a relatively new approach in mathematics that shows how categories within the field are related to one another. From this work, Bradley developed a mathematical framework inspired by large learning models (LLMs) – systems that are powered by deep-learning computer algorithms that ‘learn’ by ‘reading’ the vast amounts of public data available on the Internet. Bradley’s work used a new framework to better understand how LLMs ‘learn’, enabling researchers to build more advanced and sophisticated algorithms. Today, these kinds of models enable everything from Google’s autocomplete to chatbots such as GPT-3.
This work was often difficult and time-consuming, Bradley recalls. She would spend weeks of “blood, sweat and tears” synthesising key ideas from research articles that used unnecessarily complex language that obscured the most important insights. “After going through that struggle, I realized that there’d be one simple idea that ties all of that mess back together,” she says.
The experience felt similar to what Bradley had endured in her early calculus classes – she was frustrated by how exclusionary it felt. She turned her notes into blog entries explaining the concepts she’d encountered through her research. To her delight, they were popular with her fellow graduate students.
Having landed a research job at SandboxAQ, Bradley feels as if she’s come full circle. “I was actually drawn to maths and physics because of certain phenomena at the quantum level. So, it’s tracing back to that calculus class,” she says. “There’s something very particular about quantum physics that I just find fascinating.”
Although her venture into science communication has been challenging, it’s worth it. Otherwise, she says, she’d feel as if she was excluding large swathes of people from an incredible wealth of information. “Personally, I think maths and science are fascinating,” she says. “I don’t know about you, but when I have something that’s really cool, I want to tell everyone about it. It’s like a joyful party. I don’t want to enjoy this alone.”
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Story by Aisling O’Gara
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