Nalini Joshi

@monsoon0.bsky.social

1391 Followers 128 Following

Mathematician, wife, mother, addicted to math

Jacob Tsimerman stands on the left side of the stage dressed in a light blue (shimmering) waistcoat and trousers, and a white shirt. He has. Both hands in his pockets. The slide behind him is the last slide of his talk although it is different to what he is saying about AI at this point.
A slide is projected behind the speaker on stage, Geordie Williamson who is looking down with his hands together in front of him, and it says “Where do I stand? / would like this talk to reflect two things in roughly equal measure. - A sense of wonder at this technology: the simple (mathematical!) ideas behind it, the fact that we don't understand it, and the possibilities it already offers. - A deep concern around the potential impacts: on our discipline, on the next generation of mathematicians, and on the sense of meaning we get from intellectual activity. international Congress”
A rectangular name tag with my name at the top, followed by a line, my affiliation and title, above a WR code, the green logo of ICM2026, with a dark blue and at the bottom with the letters “VIP” in the middle.
Ingrid is dressed in an indigo t-shirt, a printed patterned light blue skirt and is standing to the left of an installation called “mathemalchemy” which is laid out on a carpeted floor in a curvilinear shape with some stools to the left of Ingrid, a silhouette of a girl-like figure in black in the middle, a raise arc of colourful spheres and a spiral tower to the right.
Huge auditorium filling up with people for the opening ceremony of the ICM in Philadelphia
A room set up for the General Assembly of the International Mathematical Union, with rows of empty chairs and tables displaying cards of member countries–the first row shows Australia (Group IV) on the left. There is a row on a podium facing the room with names of executive committee members and a slide screen on the top right of the photo.
Looking up at the circular glass dome of the Solomon R. Guggenheim museum, through the middle space surrounded by spiral floors, showing two arrangements of 12 segments of glass panes.
The interior of the Solomon R. Guggenheim museum showing the fluid white loops of the spiral ramp leading down past art exhibits from the top to the bottom staring on the left.
Looking from a corner of the north memorial pool at the World Trade Centre site in New York City. The pool at my level is reflecting other buildings and the sky, while the water moves inexorably towards the depths in the middle.
From Wikipedia: original illustration (1865) by John Tenniel (28 February 1820 - 25 February 1914), of the novel by Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, showing Alice holding a flamengo on her right knee propped up on what looks like a sea urchin, with a badger near her left foot, while staring into its eyes.
A screenshot of p.17 of the paper available at https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/74c24085-19b0-4534-9c90-465b8e29ad73/unit-distance-remarks.pdf
A table with 4 columns written in white letters on a black background labelled Subject, Year 11 2024, Year 12 2025, and Change. The highest change occurs under “Mathematics Advanced” with a change of -8,596.
An AI overview at the top of a webpage saying “Nalini Joshi, Marta Mazzocco, and Pieter Roffelsen are mathematicians known for their collaborative research on Painlevé equations and integrable systems, particularly the geometry of their solution spaces. Their published work focuses on topics such as: • Segre surfaces and geometry of the Painlevé equations: They consider a family of affine Segre surfaces associated with the q-difference sixth Painlevé equation (qPVI).”
A hitomezashi embroidery on cream in a beige frame, with one line of red running through it. Caption: “Katherine Seaton Corner percolation (2025) Corner percolation is a mathematical constrained random walk model proposed by Bálint Tóth and investigated by Gábor Pete in 2008. More recently, it has been noted that the configurations of paths and closed loops of corner percolation are found in the centuries-old domestic stitching form hitomezashi. Whether right-angled corners are placed on the vertices of a square lattice in the mind of a twenty-first century mathematician, or lines of horizontal and vertical running stitches interact tangibly when sewn with a needle as in Edo-period Japan, the potential patterns are the same. Traditionally, lines of stitching in hitomezashi are deliberately aligned or offset from their neighbours to create designs featuring small motifs repeated periodically. However, in this piece of mathematical fibre art the parity of the digits of i has been used to place the lines of stitching randomly. The result is a design comprised of closed loops of various sizes as well as paths of stitches that begin and end on an edge of the worked area. One such path has been highlighted for the eye in scarletwork.”
A photo of the stage at the front of a lecture theatre with two teams of 3 on either side of a lectern decorated with images of a robotic hand on a keyboard and a young woman writing maths on a chalkboard.
A flow chart of steps headed “DOING A TASK USING A COMPANY OR ORGANIZATION'S WEBSITE“ that starts with “Go to website try to log in” and ends with “Throw phone and laptop into the sea”.
An old black & white photograph of a young man (on the left) with his head inclined on a folded arm resting behind the shoulder of a young woman (on the right). He is looking directly at the camera, while she is looking demurely to the left of the photo with her hands touching each other and resting on her lap. Both are dressed in a fashion common in the Victorian era in England.
A screenshot of an article headline under “Science” stating “The Sydney mathematician finding a better way to keep your data safe” and text “Professor Nalini Joshi is developing the mathematics to make your secrets stronger” next to a snapshot of me looking up to the right with a smile.
Four statues of people in robes, crowns and haloes carved into an arched doorframe.
An icon of the poster RepulsiveMousse3992 within the subreddit r/math followed by the text “When do you guys think the Millenium Prize will adjust for inflation? 1 million isn't that much money anymore. It is strange if they don't adjust it and allow their prize to become irrelevant just because of inflation.”
A cartoon of a young girl sliding down a curve from right to left. She is wearing an orange t-shirt, green shorts, orange & white sneakers, has her hands flung up with a delighted grin, and has dark fuzzy hair tied up in a ponytail on top with an orange band.
A screenshot of a webpage popup saying “Solve your maths problems with your camera. Get homework help in the Google app” next to a 4 digit decimal expansion and of pi in blue framed by red, yellow, blue, green rounded corners.
A title slide with the title “How I learnt to stop worrying and love” in grey and “Elliptic Curves” in larger black font above my name and the phrase “Dedicated to Rodney J. Baxter in italics, followed by the Univeristu fo Sydney crest. The background is light olive green.
A plot of the contour lines of modulus of the natural log of the Gamma function (from https://mathworld.wolfram.com/LogGammaFunction.html). It uses a range of colours including red, magenta, blue, green, yellow, orange, and red.
The dark blue front cover of a hardback edition of “Complex analysis an introduction to the theory of analytic functions of one complex variable” by Lars Valerian Ahlfors
A room with a sloping floor and wooden benches with seated people looking towards the podium with the President at the lectern in front of a screen stating “Australian Science, Australia’s future”.
An aerial view of the main quadrangle of the University of Sydney showing slate roofs, sandstone walls surrounded by green lawns and roads.
Two people holding microphones sitting on red chairs against a screen stating “Fireside chat, Anti-wokeism: Should we be afraid?” With the names of the speakers underneath: Prof Mustafa Ozbilgin in conversation with Prof Dimitria Groutsis”
A photo of the road through the front windscreen of a car looking out over an unsealed, rippled road and borders of sage-grey bushes. The sky above is blue with lines of feathered clouds …
A gnarled gun free on the left, with air gaps between roots, on the edge of a muddy river across from trees touched by sunlight in the top branches, and a lone pelican floating on the water.
A view from high up through a mix of tall modern buildings and a traditional one with a copper roof through to blue waters with a shell-roofed building in the distance. The sun is shining on the scene from the left.
A diagrammatic map showing trajectories (in purple) of many planes (indicated as black aircraft icons) arriving and departing from Newark airport, with many loops. The screenshot indicates a time on the top left: 1:36pm and two names attributed as designers on the bottom left: Daniel Wood and Zach Levitt.
A snippet of an outlook calendar headed “27 April – 3 May 2025” showing the beginning of Sunday, Monday and Tuesday with the all-day Monday event labelled ”End of mid” and two events on Tuesday labelled as “Exercise” in two different colours.
A screenshot of a post by Eric Vyacheslav on LinkedIn with the above quote referring to a picture from a paper containing a diagram of a tree of depth 4, and caption “FIGURE 1.2. A decision tree for selecting a subset of {a,b, c}.” and “Remark. A picture like this is called a tree. (This is not a formal definition; that will follow later.) If you want to know why the tree is growing upside down, ask the computer scientists who introduced this convention. (The conventional wisdom is that they never went out of the room, and so they never saw a real tree.)”
A white coffee mug, with a rubber band wrapped around its handle, sitting on a timber chopping board on a speckled beige kitchen bench top with salt and pepper shakers and power points in the background.
The text at https://ustr.gov/issue-areas/reciprocal-tariff-calculations which describes the basic approach to calculate reciprocal tariffs, with the two contradictory statements about epsilon highlighted.
A framed poster of a music act called “quantum penguin” aka Matt Woolley with photos on the right showing him playing a violin and a guitar, date of the performance (05 March 2025) and location (Bristol Folk House).
A page describing the Royal Society of NSW Pollack prize and lecture followed by a paragraph of bio about me.
A title slide with the title “Findings from the archives The wartime diary of a Senior Wrangler An unpublished manuscript of George Birkhoff” with the name of the speaker June Barrow-Green and her affiliation: The Open University & LSE, with the event title: IMU-INI Mathematical Colloquia and Panels, and date: 6-7 March 2025
A grey wall with a long white drain pipe on the right and a central artwork showing a window with two people, one a man in a suit with a hand shading his eyes looking out to his right, the other a woman in lingerie, and one unclothes person hanging with one hand holding the window sill and one hand covering his genitalia.
A display of “potato chip chocolate” packets, wrapped in yellow with red borders containing pictures of green ridged potato chips, for sale, with prices displayed in Japanese.
Amazing table layout with multiple-shaped dishes containing small pieces of appetizers on a rounded almost rectangular lacquered tray.
A grand crystal chandelier hanging in the middle of a circular dome with a geometric design of crisscrossing arcs, rimmed with arches.
Open slide with title “Year 0” on the top left, my name and the University of Sydney crest on bottom left all on a buttery yellow background with a faint picture showing the digits of pi, arranged with bolder digits making the shape of the Greek letter pi.
Horizontal lines of nested square-roots of integers, with the first line being 1, then \sqrt{1+\sqrt{2}}, then \sqrt{1+\sqrt{2+\sqrt{3}}}, etc for 10 lines. The symmetrically centred growing lines form the shape of a Christmas tree.
A slide with the title “q-difference Painlevé equations and their Riemann Hilbert Problems” and names Nalini Joshi, Pieter Roffelsen, above the crest of the University of Sydney and an image from Alice in Wonderland showing her holding back curtains with her left hand, with a key in her right hand about to unlock a small door in the wall that had been under the curtains.
Two screens showing a handwritten slide in blue with the words “MATHEMATICS OF SOLITAIRE • REAL SOLITAIRE (KLOMOTKE) PROBLEM: WE DONT KNOW THE ODDS OF WINNING HOW TO PLAY WEIl • HOW TRE RULES CHANGE TAINS” and last line being a 1 in the circle and the words Amy, Vegas.
A view through a garden overhung by a large Morton Bay Fig tree with paved slabs in irregular shapes looking though ferns to the harbour bridge with yachts on the right and tall skyscrapers in the background.
A large kangaroo lounging on with its head up, on a leaf-scattered ground, surrounded by straight-trunked trees, with a glimpse of the sea in the background on the right.
Eight rows of positive integers with the first and last rows consisting of zeroes, then second and seventh rows of 1’s, and the intermediate rows consisting of numbers such that any adjacent a (in row n), b, c (in row n+1), and d (in row n+2), which form a square, satisfy ad-bc=1.
The front page of my thesis, which says “THE CONNECTION PROBLEM FOR THE FIRST AND THE SECOND PAINLEVÉ TRANSCENDENTS Nalini Joshi A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE FACULTY OF PRINCETON UNIVERSITY IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY RECOMMENDED FOR ACCEPTANCE BY THE PROGRAM IN APPLIED AND COMPUTATIONAL MATHEMATICS January 1987”
A bot “assistant”’s answer to the question “Who is the youngest female Abel Prize winner?”
9 images of arrangements of curved triangular shapes inside circular domains with the vertices of triangles following a spiral.
A collection of sand-coloured stones wrapped with piano wire and suspended close to the ground, with light from above projecting shadows on the ground.
Letters carved into a worn timber desk showing a name: IC MACKAY and year 1901…
A black and white photograph showing Jacqueline McKenzie smiling at Barry Otto and holding hands, with an accompanying caption card showing the name of the play “Proof”, the playwright “David Auburn” and the year of the production “2003”. An image of me is reflected in the glass covering of the photo.
Trees with overlapping curving branches sited in a grove of soft brown leaves and twigs on the ground…
A symbolic graphic showing Australia covered by hexagons, with each hexagon representing an electorate. The outcomes in each electorate is indicated by the colour of the corresponding hexagon, with orange (for NO), purple (for YES) or white (for not yet known). The national outcome is shown to be overwhelmingly orange.