Many Geometries, Many Voices

Geometry has never been a single language. From Euclidean geometry to Riemannian, symplectic, algebraic, non-commutative, tropical or derived geometries, its history is one of enlargement: new objects, new structures, new points of view, and new ways of recognising what is meaningful. This diversity is not a weakness of the field, but one of its deepest sources of richness.

In this talk, I would like to use geometry as a metaphor, but also as a case study, for thinking about LGBTQAI+ diversity in mathematics. The plurality of geometrical ideas did not arise in isolation: it was shaped by people, schools, cultures, questions, and intellectual traditions that did not always look alike. Mathematics grows when different ways of seeing are allowed to coexist, challenge each other, and transform the language of the field.

I will also briefly reflect on where we stand today in relation to LGBTQAI+ inclusion policies in European academia, and on the gap that can still exist between formal commitments and lived experience. Drawing on my own experience of navigating discrimination, I will discuss some practical lessons: how to recognise certain patterns, how to document them, how to seek allies, and how to preserve one’s mathematical voice in environments that may not always be fair.

The aim is not to present LGBTQAI+ diversity as an external moral ornament to mathematics, but as something structurally close to mathematical creativity itself: the possibility that different perspectives reveal different spaces.