Inbar Klang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics at VU Amsterdam. Born in Jerusalem, Israel, in 1992, she studied Mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem before earning her PhD from Stanford University in 2018. She then held postdoctoral positions at EPFL (Lausanne, Switzerland), the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (Berkeley, US) and Columbia University (New York, US.) She joined VU Amsterdam in 2023.
Raffaella Mulas interviewed her in February 2025.
Thank you, Inbar, for agreeing to do this interview! One nice thing about doing this over Zoom while I’m traveling is that I get to see your room! What’s the drawing behind you? Is it a portrait of you?
Haha, yes! My youngest sister made that poster when she was 10 and I was 23. It’s a drawing of me surrounded by things I love—cats, ice cream, math, and Taylor Swift’s albums. As a dedication, she wrote: “Thank you for singing songs with me!”.
That’s so sweet! If you like, we can publish the drawing along with the interview.
I shouldn’t do that to my sister! I think I’m already enough of an embarrassment for her.
Why?
Because she is a social, popular kid, and I am definitely a nerd!
Well, being a nerd is amazing, and you are social too! Now, I would like to hear more about your passions and how you got into them. Shall we start from math? How old were you when you realized you wanted to be a mathematician?
I think I was 9 or 10. Before that, my dream was to become a superhero. But around that age I realized that my mom is a professor of social psychology and I thought, “I also want to become a professor, but I want to be a professor of mathematics!”. This decision was as informed as the one of becoming a superhero, but it ended up working out.
That’s wonderful! I hope the superhero dream works out too! And how about your passion for ice cream? I was impressed when I heard you say that ice cream is one of your hobbies—I never thought of it that way, but I love it!
Of course, ice cream and chocolate are my hobbies, just like for other people coffee or wine are hobbies! My passion started in 2013, when I moved to California for my PhD and I learned that ice cream can have incredible flavors, such as lavender or olive oil!
Amazing! What about your passion for singing?
I just love singing badly—whether it’s in the shower or at karaoke! My favorite song to sing is Let It Go from Frozen. Karaoke is also a great way to meet people.
Nice! Is that how you made friends in Amsterdam over the past year and a half?
Yes, partly! I made friends in Amsterdam through karaoke, concerts, Israeli protests against the war, and also at the department. In fact, this is my favorite mathematics department I have ever been in so far!
That’s great to hear! Research-wise, what are you working on now?
One really fun project I’m working on right now has to do with scissors congruence. This is a very classical topic that started many many years ago when people started asking: “Can I cut this polytope up into pieces and obtain any other polytope with the same volume?”. Except in dimensions 1 and 2, the answer is no. There’s another invariant called the Dehn invariant that has to do with dihedral angles. The project I’m working on is with Josefien Kuijper, Cary Malkiewich (who spoke in our Colloquium on February 5), David Mehrle, and Thor Wittich. We are studying not just which polytopes can be cut and assembled into one another, but also the space of ways in which this can be done.
And what is your creative process when thinking about math?
It’s a combination of deductive reasoning and drawing pictures! If you looked at my research notebook from my PhD, most of it would be very similar looking pictures of annuli inside annuli.
Haha, nice! Is there a mathematician that you particularly admire?
Yes, Kate Ponto! She’s a professor at the University of Kentucky. I met her in 2017 at a Women in Topology program in Berkeley. From her, I learned that it’s totally possible to do cool research while also being committed to teaching and mentoring.
And what is your favourite thing about math?
That it’s about solving puzzles with friends.
I love this way of describing math. Besides singing, ice cream, chocolate, Taylor Swift, and “solving puzzles with friends”, what makes you happy?
Open water swimming, walking, watching TV, live music, spending time with friends and family, cats, and traveling!
Thank you for this delightful conversation!