Our Scientific Writing for Mathematicians workshop teaches the skills for producing papers of the highest quality suitable for the world’s top journals. Mathematics presents a unique set of challenges for writers. We tackle these partly with a strong focus on the structure of good scientific communication. The workshop includes sessions on the structure of sentences, paragraphs, abstracts and entire papers. We also run a special session on papers that combine written and mathematical content. This deals with the unique challenges that mathematicians and mathematical physicists face.

We complement this approach with sessions on editing, an underrated skill that makes a significant difference to written output. AI is changing the way researchers think about writing and, indeed, about the process of science. Our workshop examines this change, the currently available tools and how (and how not) to use them. This is a rapidly changing area, so our thinking is evolving too.We complement this approach with sessions on editing, an underrated skill that makes a significant difference to written output.

AI is changing the way researchers think about writing and, indeed, about the process of science. Our workshop examines this change, the currently available tools and how (and how not) to use them. This is a rapidly changing area, so our thinking is evolving too.Mathematics presents a unique set of challenges for writers. We tackle these partly with a strong focus on the structure of good scientific communication. The workshop includes sessions on the structure of sentences, paragraphs, abstracts and entire papers. We also run a special session on papers that combine written and mathematical content. This deals with the unique challenges that mathematicians and mathematical physicists face.

We complement this approach with sessions on editing, an underrated skill that makes a significant difference to written output.

AI is changing the way researchers think about writing and, indeed, about the process of science. Our workshop examines this change, the currently available tools and how (and how not) to use them. This is a rapidly changing area, so our thinking is evolving too.

We communicate all this with a wide range of thought-provoking exercises allowing participants to practice the skills we teach and to play with the AI assistance we introduce. Ahead of the workshop, we also ask each attendee to write an abstract about their work. They then use this as a corpus of words to apply the ideas we teach and to raise questions relating to their own work.

Proposed Schedule Day I
10:00 Introduction
10:15 Diary of a paper
10:45 The challenge of mathematical papers
11:15 Break
11:30 Sentences I
12:30 Lunch
13:30 Titles and abstracts
14:45 The process of writing
15:15 Break
15:30 Paragraphs—purpose and structure
16:30 Using AI in scientific writing
17:00 Editing exercise
17:30 End of Day I

 About us

Mark Buchanan is a physicist and science writer based in Europe. A former editor with the international science journal Nature and also New Scientist, he is the author of three books and numerous articles exploring the ideas of modern physics, with an emphasis on efforts to use novel concepts from physics to understand patterns and dynamics elsewhere, especially in biology or the social sciences. He writes occasionally for the New York Times, and has a monthly column in the journal Nature Physics.

Justin Mullins is a consultant editor at New Scientist where he has covered topics ranging from quantum computing to the emergence of artificial intelligence. He has been New Scientist’s San Francisco bureau chief and Boston Editor. He is the author of the Physics arXiv Blog (@arXivBlog) and a former teaching fellow at the University of California, Berkeley.

Together, we have been giving scientific writing workshops for over 15 years aimed at master’s students, PhD students, postdocs and more experienced scientists, many working in highly mathematical areas. Our clients include the University of Cambridge, the London Mathematical Laboratory, the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security and more than 15 institutes of the Max Planck Society including those for Quantum Optics, the Science of Light and Gravitational Physics.