Experimental Math Outreach and Popularization During COVID-19

Abstract

Since the pandemic began "Love in the Time of Corona" has become a popular meme in mass culture that superficially resonates with a large cohort. While cultural acquisition attests to the transmission of the iconography of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 1985 Love in the Time of Cholera-only a small percentage of this cohort have actually read Marquez's text. It is a novel based aesthetically in its own critical moment, at the threshold of experimental modernist and postmodernist imperative, and imbued with ideas about mathematical metaphor, mechanism, formal logic, pattern, sequence, and popularizations about chaotic and dynamic systems. In the same way, mathematics that is deeply rooted in cultural imagination can be loosely understood through the visual, symbolic, metaphoric, or even apocryphal uses in popular culture. Marquez's work suggests a colourful experimental tension between logic and imagination, during plague, as a process of abstraction set against a backdrop of popularized 20th century fiction and society. In keeping with the theme of this Springer volume on "math in the time of corona," and in concert with the underlying math of Marquez's novel, this paper explores the idea of visualization in popular and digital uses during COVID-19, to examine how experimental approaches may or may not differ from pre-COVID conditions, as examples of the way experimental math exists through visualization for outreach and popularizing as it moves from one set of platforms to another. COVID is impacting outreach and learning pathways, through experimentation and innovative translation of visual math between platforms.Modern experimental mathematics has flourished in a digital age, of computation supported by connectivity and distance, but media forms and approaches-nature of collaboration, digital resources, technological literacy, inquiry-based models, and experimentation-have undergone considerable change. Thus this paper attempts to