Women in Mathematics Stockholm 2025

Välkommen till Stockholm!
This two day conference has the goal to celebrate the achievements and increase the visibility of women and non-binary researchers in the Nordic countries. In addition the workshop gives networking opportunity for young researchers in mathematics. We gratefully acknowledge support from Kungl. Vetenskapsakademiens stiftelser, Stiftelsen G.S Magnusons fond and Digital Futures.

Invited speakers

Moira Chas (Stony Brook, USA)
Sandra di Rocco (KTH Stockholm, Sweden)
Lisa Kreusser (University of Bath, UK)
Kaisa Miettinen (University of Jyväskala, Finland)
Ragni Piene (University of Oslo, Norway)
Corinna Ulcigrai (University of Zurich, Switzerland)

Participant information

Venue

The conference will take place at KTH, in buildings close to the main entrance of KTH.

On Monday, the event (starting with networking coffee!) will take place in Salongen, inside the KTH library

On Tuesday, the room is E36 in E-huset.

Registration

Please register for the event using our registration form.
We will publish the list of participants in regular on the bottom of this site. You have the possibility to opt out from being listed.

Conference schedule

Monday:

10:00 – 11:00 networking coffee with funded participants
fun get-to-know activities from 10:15 – 10:45!
11:00 – 11:30 opening remarks
11:30 – 12:30 Ragni Piene
12:30 – 13:00 1x contributed talk
13:00 – 14:30 Lunch
14:30 – 15:30 Moira Chas
15:30-15:45 group picture
15:45 – 16:30 fika
16:30 – 17:30 Corinna Ulcigrai
17:30 – 18:00 comfort break
18:00 – 19:00 Kaisa Miettinen

Tuesday

9:00 – 10:00 Lisa Kreusser
10:00 – 10:30 fika
10:30 – 12:00 3x contributed talks
12:00 – 13:30 Lunch
13:30 – 14:30 2 x contributed talks
14:30 – 15:30 Sandra Di Rocco

Abstracts of invited talks

Moira Chas: Diversity in Three and Four Dimensions

It is a truth (almost) universally acknowledged that a random snapshot of a mathematical conference will reveal a surprising lack of variation in the gender and ethnicity of the attendees. In the first part of this talk, we will explore some possible reasons for this (impostor syndrome, fixed mindsets, gender harassment, feelings of not belonging, expectations of brilliance, accumulation of disadvantage, gender schemas, etc.), hear ideas from the audience about how to change this, and discuss our own.

The second part of the talk will focus on Alicia Boole Stott, a remarkable mathematician who made major discoveries at a time when women were rarely seen in higher education. Alicia (1860–1940), one of the daughters of the mathematician George Boole, had no formal mathematical training, yet she managed to rediscover and study beautiful shapes in four dimensions — the counterparts of regular polygons in two dimensions and Platonic solids in three. She also developed methods to build new shapes from known ones, ideas that later influenced well-known mathematicians such as John Conway. We will explore not only her mathematical achievements but also what allowed her to succeed despite the barriers of her time.

Sandra Di Rocco The Geometry of Algebraic Modeling

Algebraic geometry provides a powerful and versatile framework for modeling and analyzing complex datasets that arise across scientific and engineering disciplines. Its rich geometric language and structural insight offer unique tools for uncovering patterns, relationships, and hidden features within high-dimensional data. In this talk, we delve into how foundational ideas from classical algebraic geometry, such as polar loci, merge with modern algorithmic and computational advances to tackle key challenges in data geometry, including shape analysis and sampling strategies.
We will illustrate how algebraic methods, long grounded in abstract theory, have found concrete application in the analysis of real-world data, in particular, we will present recent progress in the computation of bottleneck degrees and rigorous criteria for sampling density, which enable robust topological characterization of data spaces. These developments stem from joint work with D. Eklund, M. Weinstein, P. Edwards, O. Gäfvert, and J. Hauenstein.

Lisa Kreusser: Getting more out of information: From applied and numerical analysis to applications

The recent, rapid advances in modern biology and data science have opened up a whole range of challenging mathematical problems which can be tackled by combining applied and numerical analysis. In this talk, I will discuss a class of interacting particle models with anisotropic interaction forces and the associated continuum limit. These models are motivated by the simulation of fingerprint patterns, of which large databases are required in forensic science and biometric applications. The central novelty in the models I consider is an anisotropy induced by an underlying tensor field. This innovation does not only lead to the ability to describe real-world phenomena more accurately but also renders their analysis significantly harder compared to their isotropic counterparts. I will also outline a mean-field optimal control algorithm for an inverse problem arising in the context of parameter identification. Going from interaction to transport networks, I will show recent numerical results for a biological network formation problem, and I will demonstrate how similar models can be used in semi-supervised learning and network science.

Kaisa Miettinen: Why are Interactive Multiobjective Optimization Methods Useful in Decision Making

Decisions are typically characterized by conflicting perspectives. This means that to be able to make good decisions, we must optimize several conflicting objective functions simultaneously. For this, we need multiobjective optimization methods. Because of the conflict, there are many so-called Pareto optimal solutions with different trade-offs among the objectives and we need additional preference information from a domain expert, a so-called decision maker, to find the final, most preferred solution. We can call it the best compromise.

We characterize different classes of multiobjective optimization methods and concentrate on interactive ones, where the decision maker takes actively part in the solution process. This means that the decision maker can learn about the interdependencies among the objectives, gain insight in the trade-offs and understand what kind of preferences are achievable. Based on the learning, the decision maker can adjust the preferences and gain confidence in the final solution.

We discuss various practical challenges of decision making problems, give some examples of interactive multiobjective optimization methods and describe how they address the challenges. We also share some experiences in solving real problems in various fields of life and briefly introduce the open-source software framework DESDEO containing implementations of many interactive methods.

Ragni Piene: Plane curves revisited

In this talk I will report on joint work with C. Riener and B. Shapiro on evolutes of real algebraic plane curves. Algebraic plane curves are probably the most studied objects in the history of algebraic geometry, starting with conic sections more than two thousand years ago. Classically these curves were geometric objects in the real Euclidean plane, defined as the zero set of a polynomial in two variables. By adding a line at infinity, projective curves arise, and by allowing complex solutions, complex projective plane curves appear. These latter curves are easier to study than their real counterparts. For example, the numerical characters of complex projective curves are known, but this is not so for real curves. Similarly, though evolutes of plane curves have been studied for more than three hundred years, there are still many unsolved problems in the real case – I will try to explain some of these.

Corinna Ulcigrai: Slow chaos: billiards, butterflies and donuts

A well popularized feature of chaotic systems is the butterfly effect. We will survey in this talk some results on various systems which display a ‘slow form’ of butterfly effect, as well as the work of several women mathematicians behind them. We will start from mathematical billiards in polygons, an idealization of the game of billiard which model many physical systems and the model introduced by Tatjana and Paul Ehernefest, to move to surfaces and the shearing effect discovered by Marina Ratner. The connection between these two words passes through the idea of ‘unfolding’ and the work of Alex Eskin and Maryam Mirzakhani, which in turn is at the base of some advances on the Ehrenfest model.

Abstracts of contributed talks

Slot 1

Maxime Faymonville (Dortmund): Semi-parametric goodness-of-fit testing for INAR models

Among the various models designed for dependent count data, integer-valued autoregressive (INAR) processes enjoy great popularity. Typically, statistical inference for INAR models uses asymptotic theory that relies on rather stringent (parametric) assumptions on the innovations such as Poisson or negative binomial distributions. In this work, we present a novel semi-parametric goodness-of-fit test tailored for the INAR model class. Relying on the INAR-specific shape of the joint probability generating function, our approach allows for model validation of INAR models without specifying the (family of the) innovation distribution. We derive the limiting null distribution of our proposed test statistic, prove consistency under fixed alternatives and discuss its asymptotic behavior under local alternatives. By manifold Monte Carlo simulations, we illustrate the overall good performance of our testing procedure in terms of power and size properties. In particular, it turns out that the power can be considerably improved by using higher-order test statistics. Additionally, we provide an application to three real-world economic data sets.

Slot 2

Annalisa Grossi (Bologna): Maximal branes of compact hyper-Kähler manifolds

On a hyper-Kähler manifold X, a real structure — or equivalently, an anti-holomorphic involution — is referred to as a brane involution. Up to hyper-Kähler rotation, an anti-holomorphic involution can become an anti-symplectic involution. When the Smith–Thom inequality is realized as an equality, the brane involution is said to be maximal. While examples of non-compact hyper-Kähler manifolds admitting maximal branes are known, the compact case presents a more intriguing picture. In particular, although some K3 surfaces admit maximal brane involutions, the main result that I will show is the non-existence of maximal branes on compact hyper-Kähler manifolds of K3^[n]-type when n=2 or n is odd.

Erin Russel (Bristol): Probability (with a hint of group theory)

You are the dealer in a card game where in each round you shuffle the deck and reveal the top card. A good shuffle ensures that the future values of the top card depend only on its present value and not its past values. How can we distinguish between a good shuffle and a bad one? This is an example of the following question: given a surjective map f : A ↠ B between finite sets, for which homogeneous Markov chains (X_t)_{t≥0} with state space A is (f(X_t))_{t≥0} a homogeneous Markov chain? This area of study is known as lumpability; this talk discusses several interesting examples of lumpability and presents applications to Markovian couplings of Markov chains.

Cintia Pacchiano Camacho (UNAM): Regularity Results for Double Phase Problems on Metric Measure Spaces

Abstract: In this talk, we present boundedness, Hölder continuity and Harnack inequality results for local quasiminima to elliptic double phase problems of p-Laplace type in the general context of metric measure spaces. The proofs follow a variational approach, based on the De Giorgi method and a careful phase analysis. The main novelty is the use of an intrinsic ap- proach, based on a double phase Sobolev-Poincaré inequality. During the past two decades, a theory of Sobolev functions and first degree calculus has been developed in this abstract setting. A central motivation for developing such a theory has been the desire to unify the assumptions and methods employed in various specific spaces, such as weighted Euclidean spaces, Riemannian manifolds, Heisenberg groups, graphs, etc. Analysis on metric spaces is nowadays an active and independent field, bringing together researchers from different parts of the mathematical spectrum. It has applications to disciplines as diverse as geometric group theory, nonlinear PDEs, and even theoretical computer science. This can offer us a better understanding of the phenomena and also lead to new results, even in the classical Euclidean case.

Slot 3

Gioia Failla (Reggio Calabria): The simplicial complexes associated to the third squarefree Veronese subring and related properties
The $r-$th squarefree Veronese subring of the polynomial ring over any field has been intensively studied by many authors (J. Herzog, T. Hibi, K.A. Adripasito and others), as it is closely related to simplicial complexes. In particular, when $r=2$, the second squarefree Veronese subring is related to the simple complete graph.
In this talk, I will describe the simplicial complex $\Delta^{(3,n)}$ associated with the third squarefree Veronese subring $A^{(3,n)}$, subring of $K[x_1,\ldots,x_n]$, generated by all squarefree monomials of degree $3$ in the variables $x_1,\ldots,x_n$, with $\deg(x_i)=1$. I will introduce some properties to identify families of pure simplicial subcomplexes of dimension $2$, that are connected and satisfy certain combinatorial properties.
Finally I will present how the intersection degree of $A^{(3,n)}$ can be computed by studying certain principal colon ideals of the subring.

Danai Kalliopi (KTH): Colored multiset Eulerian polynomials and connections to algebraic statistics
The central objects in this talk are the descent polynomials of colored permutations on multisets, referred to as colored multiset Eulerian polynomials. These polynomials generalize the colored Eulerian polynomials that appear frequently in algebraic combinatorics and are known to admit desirable distributional properties, including real-rootedness, log-concavity, unimodality and the alternatingly increasing property. In joint work with Bin Han and Liam Solus, symmetric colored multiset Eulerian polynomials are identified and used to prove sufficient conditions for a colored multiset Eulerian polynomial to satisfy the self-interlacing property. This property implies that the polynomial obtains all of the aforementioned distributional properties as well as others, including bi-gamma-positivity. To derive these results, multivariate generalizations of a generating function identity due to MacMahon are deduced. The results are applied to a pair of questions, both previously studied in several special cases, that are seen to admit more general answers when framed in the context of colored multiset Eulerian polynomials. The first question pertains to s-Eulerian polynomials, and the second to interpretations of gamma-coefficients. We will see some of these results in detail, depending on the pace of the talk. At the last part of the talk, we will see connections between multiset permutations and polytopes from algebraic statistics.

Travel grants

Applications for travel grants are closed.

Childcare grants

We have some funding which can be used to supporting travel costs of an accompanying person for a limited number of applicants. Those with youngest children will be given priority.

Accomodation

For those participants who are awarded travel grants we will provide accommodation free of charge. Otherwise, we cannot provide any help with hotel booking for the event. Please be mindful of potential scam emails, these are not from us!

Organizing committee

Danijela Damjanovic (KTH)
Carina Geldhauser (ETHZ)
Liviana Palmisano (KTH)
Martina Scolamiero (KTH)
Sofia Tirabassi (Stockholm University)

List of Participants

Andjela Mijanovic
Emily Berghofer
Peleg Bar-Lev
Anna Theorin Johansson
Annalisa Grossi
Sarah Sophie Pohl
Marina Garrote-López
Amir H. Payberah
Dr. Arzu Ahmadova
Mariem Dhifet
Benedetta Andina
Audrey Antoine
Maryam Saghi
Leonora Krajina
Sabahat Defne Platturk
Chaoli Yao
Azem Berivan Adıbelli
Samantha Nordqvist
Setareh Eskandari
Bushra Basit
Cintia Pacchiano
Ezgi Türkarslan
Dongna Chen
Cansel Kuyumcu
Matteo
Hela Ayed
Ahlem Ghiloufi
Kchaou Marwa
Asma Rouatbi
Wei Wei
Celia García Pareja
Juliet Treip
Erin Russell
Maxime Faymonville
Gioia Failla
Swati Tyagi
Amari Jaconelli
Ihsan Arharas
Shudian Zhao
Federica Milinanni
Isaac Ren
Kirthana Rajasekar
Christina Kapatsori
Björn Wehlin
Danai Deligeorgaki
Jennifer Ryan
Belén García Pascual
Wojciech Chacholski
Nurun Nesha
Jon-Magnus Rosenblad
Bahar Safari
Celine Beji
Anders Forsgren
Lorenzo Vecchi
Xuechun Hu
Gaultier Lambert

(updated May 11th)