A few questions with Elizabeth Landau

• JOEFF DAVIS
• Elizabeth Landau

Elizabeth Landau is a writer and producer for CNN.com, where she reports on health and science news. She has been fascinated by mathematics since childhood, but wanted a more people-oriented career. As an undergraduate at Princeton University, she wrote a novel about Jewish culture in Spain. She moved to Atlanta in 2007 after earning a graduate degree in journalism at Columbia University in New York. Her favorite number is pi.

Landau's story, “Mathematics for Life,” placed third in CL's 2012 Fiction Contest. We caught up with her to ask a few questions about her work.

Where did the idea for the story come from?

All of us have influences and inspirations in our lives that come from other people, and sometimes those people never know just how much of an impact they had. I began with this idea and then brought in my frustration with the perception that math is a boring, inaccessible subject. In fact, math is all around us, and we need more great teachers out there who can make the next generation of potential innovators excited about it. I wanted to get that message out also.