Dr Eugenia Cheng is a mathematician, educator, author, public speaker, columnist, concert pianist, composer and artist. She is Scientist In Residence at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She was tenured in Pure Mathematics at the University of Sheffield, UK and is now Honorary Visiting Fellow at City, University of London. She has previously taught at the Universities of Cambridge, Chicago and Nice and holds a PhD in pure mathematics from the University of Cambridge. Alongside her research in Category Theory and undergraduate teaching her aim is to rid the world of “math phobia”, and she has written 9 math books for general audiences so far.  Her first popular math book, How to Bake Pi, was published by Profile (UK)/Basic Books (US) in 2015 to widespread acclaim including from the New York Times, National Geographic, Scientific American, and she was interviewed around the world including on the BBC, NPR and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Eugenia was an early pioneer of math on YouTube and her videos have been viewed over 20 million times to date. Her next popular math book, Beyond Infinity was published in 2017 and was shortlisted for the Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize 2017, and The Art of Logic was published by Profile and Basic Books in 2018, and “x + y : A Mathematician’s Manifesto for Rethinking Gender” in 2020. “Is Math Real” won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science and Technology in 2024. Her latest book is “Unequal: the mathematics of when things do and don’t add up” (2025). She also wrote the Everyday Math column for the Wall Street Journal which ran for 8 years, and has completed mathematical art commissions for Hotel EMC2, 6018 North, the Lubeznik Center and the Cultural Center, Chicago. She is the founder of the Liederstube, an intimate oasis for art song based in Chicago. As a composer she has been commissioned by GRAMMY nominated soprano Laura Strickling and is one of the composers for the Lynx Amplify series, setting work by autistic poets who are primarily non-speaking.

Eugenia has also written two children’s books, “Molly and the Mathematical Mysteries” and “Bake Infinite Pie with x+y“. “The Joy of Abstraction: A Exploration of Math, Category theory, and Life” (Cambridge University Press) came out in 2022.

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Top left and right pictures by Paul Crisanti of PhotoGetGo.

Eugenia recommends:

The Best Books By Women About Women, Beyond Romance, Motherhood, Or Emulating Men

Unequal

The Math of When Things Do and Don’t Add Up

June 2025 (UK), September 2025 (US)