Tabitha Carvan is a science writer in the communications team at the Australian National University’s College of Science, and author of ‘This Is Not A Book About Benedict Cumberbatch’. She recently wrote this profile of mathematician Professor Amnon Neeman – the most famous Australian mathematician you’ve never heard of.

‘Reluctantly, Professor Neeman admitted that, yes, he might be able to contribute some news of interest. You’ll soon see that Professor Neeman is prone to understatement. Six months earlier he had a paper published in the highly prestigious Annals of Mathematics. In the paper, Professor Neeman solved two open problems which have, for the past 20 years, thwarted the efforts of the best algebraists in the world.’

How did you come to write this story?
When the director of the Mathematical Sciences Institute found out about Professor Amnon Neeman’s work, she immediately contacted the media team, and said this is massive, we need to do a story about this. But what the media team were presented with was a paper that was published six months ago, a paper that was incomprehensible to anyone outside the field and had no real-world application. So they were like, ‘this is amazing but what would this press release look like?’.
So we put our hand up for it. What we thought we would write about is the moment of breakthrough; a portrait of what it felt like for him to be there in that moment when he realised he had cracked this 20-year-old problem. 
When I tried to go in with my ‘tell me all about this amazing moment’, he was ‘that’s not how maths works and that’s not how I work, and that’s not the story’.

How hard was it to get him to agree to the interview? 
He was happy to talk. He’s reticent, but he’s very nice. So maybe he didn’t want to do it, but he’s too nice to say no.

How did the story develop?
I wanted to represent the experience that I had in that interview to the reader. This is not the story I thought it was. But immediately I think I was able to see why this was in fact more interesting. 
He speaks so carefully and slowly, and in this amazingly poetic way that everything he says sounds like art. I found it a really overwhelming and profound conversation to have. 
When you’re going to interview someone you almost know what you’re trying to get them to say. You almost have the answer in your head; you’re just trying to get them to say it. But the experience of realising that they’ve got something much more interesting to say than you possibly imagined is amazing. It was a wonderful experience. 
The other thing that made it really weird for me – and I think probably more affecting – was I was just in the process of having a book about to be published. I think that having someone talk about why do we do these things, who is it for, what is the purpose of looking for ideas and putting them together, is it all about blowing your own trumpet or is it just art for art’s sake – I found myself probably more receptive to this line of conversation than I might have ordinarily been.
So after the interview – and when I realised this was going to be a story about what is the point of maths, why do we do what we do – my first thought was, ‘wait till the Facebook page gets a load of this’. We publish so many amazing stories about all kinds of science research and there’s always at least one Facebook comment about how this is a waste of taxpayers’ money.
I completely disagree with those comments, but this was an opportunity to go all right, here’s a test. If we present something as legitimately having no immediate application, and therefore in their minds no point, can we in fact win them over to the idea that maybe if this has some value, maybe all that other research that we do might also have some value. So it did become a deliberate, ‘let’s see if this is an opportunity to address this ongoing problem’. 

What was the reaction to the story?
So no one has said ‘so what?’, or maybe one person out of 100. Are people reading it and then feeling chastened by the fact that they’re being called out? Or is it you just actually have to give your readers credit that if you give them the opportunity to walk them through a line of thinking, that they will come with you? 
You’ve got to write things with respect and trust that the audience are going to take it in good faith ultimately, even if their reactions are frustrating.

Did you try to understand the mathematics?
You should look at the paper. I actually wanted to include a part of the abstract of the story to indicate what we were dealing with but, you can’t even copy and paste because you need a special mathematical font installed. That’s how far away I am from even being able to make a joke about how I can’t understand. 
To give you an idea of how inaccessible is it: he wasn’t good at blowing his own trumpet, so I asked to speak to another mathematician from the university. And that mathematician, who’s an associate professor in algebra said, ‘I don’t understand the actual math of this’.
Neeman explained it to me in greater depth than I include in the story. But ultimately, I decided the point was to make it about the fact that even if you don’t understand something, maybe there is still value to it; maybe there is still there something in it for someone else. So we decided to leave that out entirely. 

How did your editor respond to the story idea?
You know it’s a good story when you come away from the interview, and you’re telling people about the experience. That, to me, is such a good benchmark of whether you’re on the right track. So they were obviously enthused. 

What did Professor Neeman think of the story?
He found the interview also very overwhelming, because he was being asked to think about his research in a way he hadn’t previously been prompted to. This is not the kind of conversation that mathematicians sit around and have with each other; great, big existential challenges. 
He’d never been interviewed before. If you have been covered in the media before, you know what the media are going to be interested in and the angle they want. I think the fact that he had a lifetime’s experience in research, but not in talking about it was what made him so open to talking about it at such a deep level so quickly.
I think he was having to accept during the interview that this was a significant moment, even if he was trying to downplay it. His emotional reaction was apparent at the time. Then when he read it, I was worried he would say even the very brief explanations of the maths were going to be wrong. And he just wrote that from a scientific perspective, this all stands, and from a personal perspective, I’m very overwhelmed.

How did it feel to have that response?
My job, which is to sit with a scientist and ask them to dumb-down their science in a way that makes it broadly accessible, I understand requires a lot of trust on their part that I am not going to make them look bad, in front of their colleagues especially. So I’m always heartened if they can see that, from an outside perspective, the result is something which has value. I was thrilled.

What did you learn from doing the story? 
You’ve got to bring your humanity to the task. If you are finding it interesting, bring that to the story. If in the conversation they say ‘x’ and it makes you think ‘why?’, bring that to the story. Don’t sidebar it. To me, that just confirmed how important it is to trust your own sense of what is noteworthy to a story.
You know how it is: you interview someone and you’re like, ‘that was so fascinating’, and then you sit down and you write a completely different story. It doesn’t draw out what you personally found fascinating about it. After the interview, the anecdotes that you’re telling your colleagues are the anecdotes that should go into the story. 

Have you always aspired to be a science writer?
It was totally accidental. I didn’t even do science at Year 12 level. I started at ANU at the College of Asia Pacific. But then, as tends to happen with internal movements, I found myself in the College of Science. There are extremely qualified science communicators here at ANU, but my job is to bring the ‘know nothing’ to a story and really try to explain it for a general audience. I’m a great benchmark –  if I can understand the story, and if I can get that information from the academic in a way that I understand, that’s a good way to know that it’s communicable to a general audience.

Tabitha spoke to Bianca Nogrady. You can read Tabitha’s profile of Professor Amnon Neeman here, and more of her work here, and her book ‘This Is Not A Book About Benedict Cumberbatch’ here.