During the Weekend of Science 2025, mathematician Raffaella Mulas from VU Amsterdam — also known as Graphaella in the graph theory world — invited children to think about stereotypes in a playful way. Her talk, titled “Don’t shrink for a stereotype!”, told the story of how she was once invited to a television show that wanted to put her in the “math nerd” box. She encouraged kids to embrace all sides of who they are, without letting labels or expectations shrink them.
The talk was based on her TEDx talk “Dancing out of the box: A TV show’s lesson on stereotypes”, adapted for a younger audience, and together with Roni Bulent Ozel, she added a short swing dance show within the performance, which ended with the children joining the dancing! The audience enjoyed the show so much that the duo was asked to perform it again an hour later. The full video of the performance is available here.
The event took place at VU Amsterdam, thanks to the initiative of the Department of Physics and Astronomy. Many other departments joined, contributing their own scientific activities as part of their stands, and Raffaella’s performance was the only live show.
Raffaella is also the founder of Nora – Center for Science Communication, an international community that connects scientists and artists and will soon grow into a formal non-profit foundation. A passionate science communicator and storyteller, Raffaella combines mathematics with art, narrative, and performance. She is also the author of the Springer book Stories Behind Theorems: Conversations with Mathematicians, and created the course Storytelling and Science Communication at VU Amsterdam. In this course, Bachelor’s, Master’s and PhD students in STEM learn how to communicate science in a clear, personal, and engaging way, culminating in a public performance. The outcomes of the course can be seen here.
During the course Storytelling and Science Communication participants also designed a performance.