Name:  Kathryn Nyman
Age:  38
Location:  Salem, Oregon
Occupation: Mathematician and college professor

Wisconsin native Kathryn Nyman wants you to know that taking a knife to a chocolate torte isn’t just a delicious way to share some sweets. “One of my recent projects has to do with cake-cutting, which is the study of how to divide up goods in such a way that everyone feels like they got the best piece. While it may not sound like there are any uses of cake-cutting beyond a birthday party, the theory actually has applications to dividing land, inheritance, mining rights, chores, and even airport landing fees,” she says. To this mathematician, sharing her numerical knowledge adds up to a really awesome life.

In college, Kathryn had an professor who asked, “In what other profession do you get to play games all day long?” It was then that she knew she should go into the field of mathematics, even though her original path had been to pursue physics. But because her small school hadn’t been able to secure a physics professor, and because of her brilliant advisor and professor who nudged her towards numbers games, Kathryn became a mathematics professor herself. Now, not only does she teach two or three classes per day, she also does a lot of research. Other than the cake cutting project, she’s working on an overview of the mathematics of voting, which looks at the numbers and statistics that can be guaranteed depending on how many people share certain interests. “I enjoy problems like these, which lie in the intersection of mathematics and personal preferences,” she explains.

One of the best parts about Kathryn’s job has been being able to prove a theorem. “Sometimes my collaborators and I will work on a problem for a couple years and so it’s a real cause for celebration when we finally solve it,” she says.

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