About Me

Judy grew up in rural Austria with an insatiable need to understand everything: how a Rubik’s cube works, why Mozart sounds better than her random piano experiments, and most importantly: how people think.

That curiosity took her on quite a detour. What was supposed to be 9 months of volunteer work in Cape Town, South Africa turned into 11 years and a PhD in Theoretical Physics from the University of Cape Town. Somewhere between the research papers and the accelerated atomic nuclei, she became something most people dread becoming: a real, live research mathematician.

And here is the thing nobody tells you about research mathematicians. They are among the most passionately obsessed people on the planet. Not because math is easy, but because they have quietly mastered a set of life skills that most people never get taught: how to stay curious when things get hard, how to kill your ego when you are wrong, how to find beauty in a problem instead of running from it, and how to keep going when the answer is nowhere in sight.

After her postdoctoral research fellowships at the University of Tübingen and the Erwin Schrödinger institute in Vienna, Judith left academia with one mission: to share exactly those skills with the rest of the world. Through her keynotes and her book Math (Re)Imagined, she brings the mindset of a research mathematician to audiences who never knew they needed it.

It turns out, they really do.