01/12/2023

The unlikely 'marriage' between mathematics and journalism.

How to produce reports on mathematics in a didactic way and reach the lay public? The challenge was the subject of discussion among the winners of the Fridays edition of the IMPA Journalism Award , in the webinar that aired on IMPA's YouTube channel , this Friday (1st). Bruno Vaiano (Superinteressante), Rafael Garcia (O Globo) and Bruno Romani (O Estado de S.Paulo), winners in the Mathematics category, spoke with the award judges, Marcelo Viana, general director of IMPA, and the coordinator of the institute's Press Office, Raphael Gomide.

Exploring logical reasoning, using infographics, and even GIFs were some of the methods used by the three journalists to communicate mathematics in a lighter and more engaging way to their readers. The director-general of IMPA described the journalists' work as "courageous." "Doing science communication is difficult, but talking about mathematics is another story. So, you are especially courageous and extremely successful," said Viana.

First place winner in Mathematics with the report “The Primacy of Primes” , Bruno Vaiano, from Superinteressante Magazine, explains the concept of prime numbers and their importance, mainly for cryptography. The work also presents Euclid's proofs and the Riemann zeta function, in addition to addressing recent studies on prime numbers such as that of the Chinese scientist Yitang Zhang.

“We cited six different contemporary mathematicians, from different countries, from different institutions, and I showed how they all contributed to new results with prime numbers. And they have crazy stories. The Chinese mathematician, Yitang Zhang, didn't finish high school; he migrated to the US and worked at a Subway restaurant and arrived at a very important result. At the same time, you have the English mathematician James Maynard, who proved another result that earned him the Fields Medal – the Nobel Prize of mathematics. So, what I try to highlight in my articles is that mathematics is done by human beings and that you don't need to be a genius to get there.”

The journalist also highlighted the importance of Quanta Magazine – a publication dedicated to covering topics related to mathematics, physics, biology, and computer science – in providing inspiration for story ideas.

Rafael Garcia, who won second place with the report " Rio de Janeiro group makes progress on a problem that has challenged mathematicians for over 90 years , " published in the newspaper O Globo, spoke about the challenge of "translating" the advances made in Ramsey's Theorem to the newspaper's audience. The results were obtained through studies involving IMPA researcher Robert Morris, Marcelo Campos (Oxford), who at the time was a doctoral student at the institute, and other researchers, Julian Sahasrabudhe (Cambridge) and Simon Griffiths (PUC-Rio). Garcia explains that the strategy was to adopt infographics to facilitate communication with readers.

“I read about the advances in Nature and didn't understand the problem formulation. I researched some more basic papers and it was still difficult to visualize, until I found visual references showing graph diagrams to formulate the problem, which is basically about patterns of connections between interconnected points. I spoke with Marcelo Campos, one of the authors of the article, and he gave me as an example the case of people who knew each other and didn't know each other at a party and how the interconnection between them happens. So, I started sketching an infographic. I put the paper aside and started drawing in vectors. It was so complex that when I went to pass the images to the art department of the newspaper, they said it was practically ready,” the journalist said about the challenge of “translating” the mathematics.

Bruno Romani, who won third place with the report "Words become numbers: understand how ChatGPT's artificial intelligence works , " published in the newspaper O Estado de S.Paulo, says that the objective of the article was to explain the mathematics behind the tool capable of creating texts on a wide variety of subjects. The work used devices such as GIFs to explain how Artificial Intelligence works and how to feed the tool.

“My idea was to explain the Artificial Intelligence architecture that powers Chat GPT. Suddenly, the subject moves from a niche to a casual bar conversation; suddenly everyone knows about AI or has heard of it, but not necessarily how it works. So, at the height of Chat GPT's popularity, I felt it was time to get down to brass tacks and explain the mathematical models. But how do you do that? That's when I decided to use GIFs.”

Last Wednesday (29), the webinar with the winners in the Scientific Dissemination category of the Fridays IMPA Award discussed the progress and challenges of scientific journalism in Brazil. Bernardo Esteves (Piauí), Catalina Leite (O Povo) and Isabela Moreira (Revista Galileu) also spoke with Marcelo Viana and Raphael Gomide. Both meetings remain available on the IMPA page on YouTube. See here! The IMPA Journalism Award offered a total of R$ 36,000 to the six winners in the competition.