I am a Flora Philip Research Fellow in the School of Mathematics at the University of Edinburgh. Previously I was a JSPS Postdoctoral Fellow at Osaka University, Japan.
My research has to do with numerical, homological and homotopical invariants of metric spaces and graphs that derive from an interpretation of a metric space as a type of enriched category. More generally, I am interested in enriched category theory and its applications within and beyond pure mathematics.
In 2024–25, Djordje Mihajlovic, Siddarth Setlur, Darrick Lee, Sjoerd Beentjes and I are organizing the AGATE Seminar: Applied Geometry, Algebra and Topology in Edinburgh.
With Yasuhiko Asao, Yu Tajima and Masahiko Yoshinaga, I organized the workshop Magnitude 2023, which took place in Osaka in December 2023.
From 2020 to 2023, Ruben Van Belle and I ran Edinburgh's Category Theory Seminar. It is now run by Adrián Doña Mateo and Tom Leinster; current details can be found at Adrián's site. Slides from past talks are still available on this site.
In 2019–20 Guy Boyde and Aryan Ghobadi and I organized a meeting for junior researchers called Topics in Category Theory: A Spring School. You can look at the programme of events or the conference photograph.
I haven't always been a mathematician. From 2011 through 2016 I worked as a welfare rights adviser with the Child Poverty Action Group, Drumchapel Money Advice Centre and WestGAP, and from 2005 until 2013 I (also) worked as a producer of music and arts projects with Arika and Tracer Trails. I have an undergraduate degree from the School of Scottish Studies at the University of Edinburgh.
I'm interested in talking with non-mathematicians about what mathematics has to do with understanding—and shaping—the social world, and I'm a fan of pedagogical experiments that aim to make such conversations possible. Some experiments that I've been part of are documented on this site.
e-mail: emily (dot) roff (at) ed (dot) ac (dot) uk