Mathematics and Dance: An Interview with Nancy Scherich

By Allison Henrich, with Nancy Scherich

AH: Can you tell me about how you got interested in dance?

NS: I was brought up watching musicals from the Golden Age of Hollywood. I was probably one of the few children in the 1990s whose favorite celebrities were Fred Astair and Elenor Powell. For as long as I can remember, I wanted to be a star on Broadway when I grew up. It wasn’t until I was 12 years old that my family could afford to put me in dance lessons, and I have been dancing ever since.

AH: How did you get interested in pursuing a career in mathematics?

NS: When I was 14 years old, I was cast in a traveling circus that performed every Friday for several months. My high school would not let me miss every Friday of school, so I decided to drop out and attend a community college instead. (Yes, I have a PhD but not a high school diploma!) At the community college, I took all sorts of courses—theater, dance, sewing, French, you name it.

At that time, my father was a high school math teacher. His education was in art and philosophy, but he had taken just enough math courses to teach high school math. My father was concerned about my far-fetched dream to become a famous performer. He encouraged me to take as many math classes as I could so that if my performing career didn’t pan out, I could always fall back on being a high school math teacher. I followed his advice, and I kept taking math courses—and I never stopped! I fell in love with mathematics in my second semester Calculus class. When I learned I could compute the volume of a donut with my mind, I felt like I had discovered some clandestine math universe and I was hooked. I changed my major to mathematics, and slowly my career dreams shifted from famous performer to mathematician.

AH: You won Science Magazine’s 2017 Dance your PhD Competition, and you won honorable mention in the NSF’s We are Mathematics competition in 2019. When did you realize that there could be a connection between your mathematical work and your dance practice?

NS: In 2016, I started aerial silks classes with a performance troupe. We learned and performed new routines every couple of months. A year later, a friend sent me the announcement for the 2017 Dance your PhD competition and said that I had no excuse but to make a video. I was familiar with the Dance your PhD competition from previous years, but I had never thought to make a submission myself. I was a fourth year graduate student who danced five nights a week, and I was entrenched in the lie that it was impossible to communicate mathematics using plain English, let alone dance. When my friend eagerly suggested I make a submission, I remember thinking to myself:

What if I just pretend it’s not impossible to express math using dance. In this hypothetical world, what kind of story would I create?

When you give your imagination permission to explore, it is incredible what you can come up with. I was flooded with ideas for mathematical stories embodied by dancers and landscapes. I became obsessed with making a video for this competition. I worked on it tirelessly for a month. I wrote the story, made all the costumes and props, choreographed the dances, and gathered my team. We filmed in two very long days, and then spent another month editing the footage. It was an amazing summer that changed my life. Since then, I have made another Math-Dance video, and have done several live Math-Dance performances. I have another video project in progress, but the pandemic has delayed the production.

AH: How was your work for Dance Your PhD received? Did you ever get the message that spending time on dance was detrimental to your pursuit of a math PhD? Do you feel like you have benefitted from combining your interests in this unique way?

NS: People respond to my Math-Dance work in one of two ways: they either love it, or they don’t get it at all. I suspect that this divide correlates to whether a person values math outreach, or not.

In grad school, there was a definite sense that my research was my “real” work and that my Math-Dance work was a (pretty cool) distraction. This makes sense in the context that my department was responsible for getting me through to graduation and dancing was not furthering my thesis. When on the job market, I was advised to downplay my Math-Dance activities when applying for research focused positions, and highlight my Math-Dance activities when applying for teaching positions. There was a fear that I wouldn’t be taken seriously by the research community.

Before I started Math-Dancing, there were many times in my career where I doubted my decision to become a mathematician. I felt like I was a multidimensional person with tons of interests, but I was living a one-dimensional life as a mathematician. I felt I wasn’t fulfilling my potential. Combining my talents through Math-Dance renewed my passion for my career. I always have a little voice in the back of my mind, asking “Could I turn this math into a dance?” I feel much more at peace with myself and my work now.

AH: What words of advice do you have for other mathematicians who have “non-math” passions?

NS: There are many ways to make substantial contributions to the math community besides proving theorems. Your non-math passions are your avenues to contribute. Find a way to bring your passions into your math practices. You can start by giving yourself permission to explore “what if…?” What if you could do mathematics and ____ at the same time? What story would you tell?