End of Award Report: Mathematical Images and Identities: Education, Entertainment, Social Justice Heather Mendick, Debbie Epstein and Marie-Pierre Moreau I was talking about my friend who was the maths geek. He came back this summer and he has got like the pi symbol and it’s about an inch big tattooed on like the underside of his wrist. Everyone was telling me he had ‘pi’ and I was thinking, ‘why has he got a pie tattooed on his wrist?’ And I was thinking, ‘what kind of pie would it be and why would you think let’s have a pie?’ And then everyone was like, ‘what are you on about? Pi you know.’ And I was like ‘oh!’ But he thinks it is like the best thing ever, so much so that he has had it now permanently tattooed on him. [laughter] You wouldn’t go and get Marx, you know, ‘I really like Marx let’s have him tattooed,’ or something like that, you know. We start by juxtaposing this mathematical identity work from our data with a media image of 8-year-old Lisa Simpson thinking about pi and her father Homer Simpson thinking about pie (http://www.mathsci.appstate.edu/~sjg/simpsonsmath/). The link between the cartoon and the quotation from a social science undergraduate raises questions about the relationship between images and identities that are at the heart of this research. In many ways it is typical of how people position themselves relative to mathematics and mathematicians, in its distancing through easy use of ‘geek’ and multiple misunderstandings: that it is mathematical pi rather than edible pie; how anyone could relate to the symbol pi in that way; and even more, how someone could relate to a subject in that way; the comparison with Marx renders this obsessive and excessive. It is also typical in the way that people, whether they like and do mathematics or not, expect mathematics to be written on the body, though rarely so literally. UK Data Archive Study Number 6097 - Mathematical Images and Identities: Education, Entertainment and Social Justice, 2006-2007