Elizabeth Meckes's expository and educational writing

Elizabeth hated seeing the word "passion" used in connection to mathematics. On the one hand, she knew that passion without hard work doesn't accomplish anything. On the other, she feared that pervasive talk about how "passionate" mathematicians supposedly are about their field could drive away students who are interested and talented but who sometimes get bored or actually can imagine doing something else with their lives (which is to say, all of us, although we're trained to believe we shouldn't admit to it).

Nonetheless, if there was a part of her job that Elizabeth was passionate about, it was communicating about mathematics, in all forms and at all levels.

Here is a collection of things that Elizabeth wrote and said to educate people in various audiences, from the general public up to researching mathematicians, about mathematics and what mathematicians do.

Books

Expository articles

• The Laws of Probability, Parts 1 (What Makes a Coin Fair?) and 2 (Zooming In), from Girls' Angle Bulletin, October/November 2015 and December 2015/January 2016.

  An explanation for a lay audience of the idea of axiomatic probability, the law of large numbers, and the central limit theorem.

• The Eigenvalues of Random Matrices, IMAGE, the Bulletin of the International Linear Algebra Society, no. 65, pp. 9–22, 2020

  A survey of classical and recent results about eigenvalues of random matrices, written for mathematicians and others who study and use matrices but may not be accustomed to thinking about randomness.

Lecture notes

• Concentration of Measure on the Compact Classical Matrix Groups

  Course notes from the 2014 Women and Mathematics program at the Institute for Advanced Study, 2014. These are supplanted by the book The Random Matrix Theory of the Classical Compact Groups above, but are kept available because they have been cited several times.

• How far is the horizon?

  Brief notes for a class Elizabeth taught for Math Corps Cleveland.

Slides from expository talks (for mathematicians)

• "Random Matrices from the Classical Compact Groups", plenary lecture at the 20th Conference of the International Linear Algebra Society, held in Leuven, Belgium in 2016.
• "Randomness in geometry and topology: finding order in the chaos", four part mini-course at the 2013–2014 Low-dimensional Structure in High-dimensional Systems (LDHD) Summer School at SAMSI:
  • Linear Projections of High-Dimensional Data
  • Random Unitary Matrices and Friends
  • The Topology of Random Spaces
  • Stein's Method: The last gadget under the hood
• "Approximating by the Normal Distribution", Conference on Number Theory and Random Phenomena at the University of Bristol, March 2007.

Other writings

• Some personal thoughts that Elizabeth wrote down when Karen Uhlenbeck was awarded the Abel prize.

  This brief essay, along with a response by Karen Uhlenbeck, has now been published as part of "Brilliance and Generosity of Heart": Elizabeth Meckes (1980—2020) in the March 2022 issue of Notices of the American Mathematical Society, by Della Dumbaugh.

• "A Theory, in Science", letter to the editor in The New York Times, August 8, 2005.

  This was probably Elizabeth's shortest published piece of writing, but the venue she was most proud to be published in.

• Elizabeth's six word memoir:

  Wonderful family and friends, some theorems.

• Samples of Elizabeth's scratch work, part of which was included in Girls' Angle Bulletin, Volume 11, number 1.

Interviews

• Formula for Success, Stanford Magazine, November/December 2004
• An Interview with Elizabeth Meckes, Parts I and II, from Girls' Angle Bulletin, December 2010 and February 2011
• Five questions with... Elizabeth Meckes, The Daily, March 19, 2018