Dr Clare Wallace

Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematical Sciences

What do you do?

I grew up in Durham – my whole family live here. When I applied for University, I was determined to move away! I started small, moving just down the road to York, but spent time in Toulouse and then studied for two years in Paris. I came back to Durham in 2017 for my PhD, and have been really lucky to be able to stay here ever since. I’m now on the Education track, which means my focus is on making our teaching even better for staff and students. 

How are you involved in this area of science? 

Chalkdust is a magazine for the mathematically curious. We put out two issues a year, and try to fill them with good maths and bad jokes. We have a long-standing set of regular joke content inspired by real magazines: an agony aunt, letters page, adverts for mathematical products – as well as really excellent articles submitted by our readers.

All of the editors are volunteers – including me and Adam – and we’re all doing about ten different jobs at once. We try to involve students as much as possible, by encouraging them to submit articles based on their dissertations, or to help us come up with joke content (this also dilutes Adam’s Radio-2 inspired jokes - quite a lot of our target audience are far too young for them) and we’ve had some excellent contributions from Durham students – look out for the Chalkdust Dissertation prize-winner in Issue 20! 

What do you love about this topic?

Chalkdust is a really great way for us to reach people on their own terms. Lots of people think that maths is boring, or difficult, or irrelevant, and I love that we get a chance to prove them wrong. I think “mathematically curious” is the key thing here: we’re encouraging people to look a little closer at a fun or interesting piece of maths, and we get to use the “which alphabet is your soulmate” quiz as the opening line (mine is Greek). 

How does this work deliver real-world impact?

We distribute 3000 copies across 29 UK universities, ship internationally, and send boxes to schools. It’s lovely to see UCAS forms mentioning the magazine as inspiration for studying maths. And further up, it’s great that many former team members have used their involvement as evidence of peer review and communication skills for job and academic applications, and many of our authors have been able to point to their published work in their careers.  

Find out more:

• Learn more and read the latest issue of Chalkdust
• Follow Chalkdust on Instagram