Audience: Everyone, and especially teachers who want to show to their students a mathematician explaining research mathematics

In this episode we meet Moshe Cohen, a mathematician who studies ways to arrange planes in 4-dimensional space. The interview starts with an easier question that can be answered by any student in any grade. Enjoy!

The main problem presented in this video is the motivation behind several papers, including the paper, “Moduli spaces of ten-line arrangements with double and triple points,” by Meirav Amram, Moshe Cohen, Mina Teicher, Fei Ye. The paper was supported in part by the Minerva Foundation of Germany through the Emmy Noether Institute and the Oswald Veblen Fund of the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton. Moshe’s travel back to the United States to produce this video was supported by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme, Grant FP7-ICT-318493-STREP.

While the paper is not for a general audience (it’s written for other mathematicians), high school students may still enjoy looking at it to see what advanced theorems and proofs look like.

CHANNEL: Geometry and Topology Today
© 2015 Scott Baldridge and David Shea Vela-Vick
Supported by NSF CAREER grant DMS-0748636