For this leading mathematician, numbers are personal

(April 2024) Maria Elizabeth Losada was a lonely child – partly because she couldn't find classmates who shared her love of math. 

That changed when she began to enter math competitions in Colombia, where she grew up. She met teachers, students, and others who loved the challenging beauty of an elegant math problem.

“You have problems that capture you, they capture your imagination, they make you want to solve them,” she says in a new Transform Talks interview. 

Today, Dr. Losada is Board Chair of the International Mathematical Olympiad Foundation (IMOF)

She notes that girls are not necessarily encouraged to pursue math – even if they like it. 

“We find that in primary school and in early high school, like middle school, the girls are fine. They're doing as well as the boys. There's no difference. But once they reach certain age and they're more ladylike, many of them just don't put so much priority into the math” – something Losada attributes to cultural factors.