Meet the Curious Minds - Myfanwy Evans
Meet the Curious Minds - Myfanwy Evans
Interview by Lise Ninane
Berlin, 22 January, 2021
Myfanwy Evans is a Mathematician and Physicist who researches the complex geometric shapes, such as entangled networks and filamentous structures, that appear in biological materials. After completing her PhD at the Australian National University, she moved to Germany and is now the Professor for Applied Geometry and Topology in the Institute for Mathematics at the University of Potsdam.
Myfanwy will give a talk at our ArtScience Monthly #11, where she will introduce us to the questions that drive her research and curiosity. Prior to this, we wanted to explore in this interview what her work is about.
Credits: Sarah Winborn
LN: Myfanwy, could you tell us about the topic of your research?
ME: Sure! So, I’m a mathematician working on geometry and topology. Geometry and topology are very closely related fields. Geometry is about shapes and topology is about slightly more abstract properties of those shapes.
What I’m really interested in is describing geometric structures in real materials or biological materials. These shapes are particularly complex. And then I explore the mathematical ideas around those shapes, so that I can maybe say something about why those shapes are there, how they are formed and what functions they have in the original material.
I guess particular themes in my work are entangling and surfaces. Entangled structures are very difficult to describe mathematically. If the mathematical ideas are too strict, then the structures that you are able to describe are too simple, but if you try to describe a very complex systems, then the descriptions you end up with are often very imprecise. My work is trying to bridge these extremes and see if we can say something more rigorous about the very complicated structures, and this often leads to nice new mathematical ideas.
LN: Would you have an example of an entangled structure that you are studying? At what scale does it appear?
ME: I work on the microstructure of mammalian skin cells, like the dead skin cells that you can scratch off your hand. At a small length scale, we just see the atoms and how they bond together. But zooming out to a “mesoscale”, we see the bundles of proteins forming filaments, which are called the keratin intermediate filaments. These filaments wind and weave around each other in a beautifully symmetric pattern, and the geometry of this weaving drives a swelling mechanism, where, like a sponge, it can soak up moisture and expand in a coherent way. This spongy behaviour is what makes our skin wrinkle after too long in the bath. So in this case, it’s a relationship between geometry and functioning of the dead skin cell that I find interesting, and that I want to understand more carefully.
LN: Could you tell us more about your research process and the kinds of results that you are trying to get to?
ME: Given the example of the skin geometry, I could then ask the question if there are other related geometric structures, and mathematics helps me to define what related means here. Once I have explored related ideas, it might be the case that these related geometries have similar physical properties, which might be useful for studying other systems, or even designing new materials.
But it’s all in a relatively abstract setting; I’m just playing around with shapes as a mathematician. I work with shapes that I know are relevant to the field of biology and materials but I don’t do it explicitly because it’s relevant; I explore mathematically what is there.
LN: Are there perhaps some philosophical questions that arise for you through your research?
ME: I guess you could say…has nature made all of the best mathematical shapes already? And also, what nature can make is so much more sophisticated than what humans can make. And so I guess the question behind that is: can we ever catch up to nature?
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