11 Betties
Concept and Direction, Content Strategy and Creation, Naming, Recruitment
Role: Founder + Editorial Director
TEAM: 11 Betties
With a laptop, a garage, and the audacity, I founded and ran an educational editorial platform with the mission of transforming Gen Z’s relationship to math. Late nights spent writing articles explaining the Pythagorean Theorem through pop culture references led to critically acclaimed videos, brand partnerships, events, funding, and a wildly passionate group of collaborators, contributors, and champions.
origins
11 Betties began as a site for teen girls, inspired by a group of highly creative math students I tutored while my own creative career took shape. They were all stuck, and I knew their intelligence wasn’t the problem. So instead of trying to get them to fit into the math, I turned the tables—taking everything that they were into and finding the math in that.
Lady Gaga became a way to understand linear equations; My So-Called Life held the key to multiplying negative numbers; George Clooney’s dating history illustrated how to solve for X, and geometry was everywhere, from parking garages to hairstyles to neon lights.
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Breakups are mathematical. TV shows are mathematical. The beat of a Sex Pistols song is all math. Math lives and breathes in pop culture and fashion and art.
By discovering the math in everything that lights you up, we seek to transform the idea of it from irrelevant and boring to essential and thrilling.
Moving into new mediums, I collaborated with my brother DJ Cams on a math-themed soundtrack Algorhythms, pulling quotes from classic teen media like Freaks and Geeks, Mean Girls, and Clueless, which inspired the name 11 Betties.
As 11 Betties gained a following, the media began to call. BUST Magazine gave early digital and printed press, which was a perfect fit: the original content was influenced, among other things, by magazinges like BUST and Sassy.
SPOTLIGHT: HOW I DO MATH
Expanding into video, I interviewed 11 women and girls about how they uniquely do math—receiving lots of organic press and praise.
“This is just everything. The ladies at Grey Sloan Memorial would approve.”
Shonda Rhimes on how i do math
SPOTLIGHT: MATH BRAIN
A PSA in the style of an ’80s infomercial, funded by The Harnisch Foundation and fueled by research and rage.
“Math Brain is the feminist infomercial you’ll actually want to watch.”
LEGACY
I may have hung up my math crown, but the 11 Betties spirit is alive and well. The work led to creative endeavors like The Limit Does Not Exist and a column for Forbes, and continues to live on every time I translate complex ideas (which is all the time). Math turned out to be the perfect gymnasium for figuring out how to solve challenging equations with audacious creativity.