ALUMNI COR In this section of The Chameleon, we focus on an alumna and faculty member who is involved in the creative arts to highlight that not only are students doing wonderful writing and art, but so are professors across campus. Addie Armstrong ’10 is a math professor at Norwich University and serves as the Chair of the Institutional Review Board and Research Ethics Committee. Her current research focuses on aspects of graph theory. In her spare time, Armstrong can be found writing. Professor Armstrong was interviewed on her work by Ben Zacher ’20, one of The Chameleon’s 2020 editors.
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Ben Zacher: As a math professor, why do you write?
Addie Armstrong ’10
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Addie Armstrong: I always wrote when I was growing up. It basically came down to two things, what I would do: I would either write or I would do research in mathematics. And they’re not very similar. But in some ways, they actually are. When you get to research-level mathematics, what you do in mathematics is you think about ideas that people have never thought about before. So you spend a great deal of time imagining if there were rules, and how would things be affected by those rules, which at some level is very similar to writing, particularly science fiction, because you imagine the future in which there are some rules and you try to apply those rules to society. So, I actually see the two as very similar. I also like writing because it exercises the other half of my brain, so to speak. It’s not analytical. It’s not ‘these are always the rules.’ I’m allowed to change the rules when I write. And that’s a lot of fun. I’ve always thought, well, I could either be a writer or a mathematician, and I kind of became a mathematician. So we’ll do that for a while and then we’ll see.
