11 Betties
Concept and Direction, Content Strategy and Creation, Naming, Recruitment
Role: Founder + Editorial Director
TEAM: 11 Betties
With a laptop, a garage, and a mission, I founded and ran an educational nonprofit media studio for making math creative and relevant when that was still a very strange thing to say. Late nights writing articles soon led to educational events, critically acclaimed videos, brand partnerships, funding, and a passionate group of collaborators, contributors, and champions of the cause.
origins
11 Betties began as an editorial website 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 cavalier dating habits uncovered how to solve an algebra problem; geometry was everywhere, from parking garages to hairstyles to neon lights.
“
Breakups are mathematical. TV shows are mathematical. The beat of a Sex Pistols song is mathematical. Math lives and breathes in pop culture and fashion and art.
By discovering the math in everything that lights up teen girls, 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 the conversation 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
How I Do Math’s angry, stylish, punk rock little sister: an ’80s-style infomercial fueled by research and rage, and funded by the Harnisch Foundation.
“Math Brain is the feminist infomercial you’ll actually want to watch.”
LEGACY
Though I’ve hung up my math crown, the 11 Betties spirit remains alive and well. The work directly led to creative endeavors like The Limit Does Not Exist, and continues to live on through teaching in the EV Lab, lecturing on innovation at the Rady School, and every time I translate complex ideas for diverse audiences. Math turned out to be the perfect gymnasium for figuring out how to solve challenging equations with audacious creativity.