As the summer of 2021 lengthened and autumn began to approach, the website for “Mathemalchemy”—the unique, hallucinatory, room-sized mathematical mixed-media sculpture under construction by mathematicians from all over the world—showed a countdown to its unveiling. On August 15, 2021, at noon, in Gross Hall on West Campus, students, supporters, and the dozens of mathematicians who created parts of it would join together to unveil it.

With the preponderance of available data has come a preponderance of concern about how the information is used and who possesses it. Kristian Lum M.S. ’08, Ph.D. ’10 counts herself among those concerned. And as lead statistician at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, she’s in a position to help elucidate data use.

“A lot of my work touches on the ways in which data and machine learning may not work in the way you’d like or hoped,” she says.

A Duke researcher has developed a 3D imaging technique for peering into the layering of a painting. Warren Warren, a chemist and biomedical engineer at Duke, develops laser systems to image human tissues. But he thought his work might be useful for art historians as well.

Ingrid Daubechies’ eyes dart down at her plate of mixed salad greens. She stabs a hefty chunk of endive hiding beneath an arugula leaf and chews it quickly. The words are coming fast now.

“We don’t get a three-dimensional map,” she says. “We have a much higherdimensional map. More like eighty. But I can only explain it in three dimensions.”

It takes brains to be good at math - as in, two halves of one brain, working together. That's the conclusion of Joonkoo Park, a postdoctoral fellow in Duke's Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, who led a study linking communication between the left and right halves of the brain to mathematical ability. Park had subjects perform simple math problems while he studied images of activity in their brains.