Mayuko Yamashita: Translator of the universal language

Mayuko Yamashita listens to the language of the universe — and the various dialects that language can take. 

She’s most comfortable speaking the dialect of pure mathematics, a realm of beautifully elegant puzzles and solutions, which may or may not be applicable to anything in the real world. 

Now, at Perimeter Institute, she hears a vibrant mix of dialects – those of astrophysics, quantum information, quantum gravity and other lexicons scientists apply to the most fundamental questions of time and space. 

She strives to be a kind of interpreter of dialects, seeking out the unexpected places where various theories are pointing toward a new discovery. 

“I came from rather pure mathematics,” she says. “But here, more people are thinking from a physical point of view. And that’s very much interesting and also challenging for me.”

She isn’t complaining about the challenge; for her, the challenge is part of the fun. 

Her research is about discovering the unexpected connective tissue between different approaches to deep questions. 

“My role especially here is to connect mathematics and physics,” she says. “Especially being a bridge between those areas.”

The bridge is needed because the two communities can drift apart even while studying similar objects. The dialects get muddied with deep mathematical conundrums or enormous datasets from experiments. 

“People are developing in a different language so that they are hard to communicate.”

When she arrived at Perimeter in 2025 with what she calls a “pure mathematical mind,” she was somewhat taken aback by all the dialects of physics subfields, but also encouraged that such lively collaboration was possible thanks to the shared lingua franca of mathematics. 

Yamashita’s research draws on homotopy theory, a branch of mathematics that studies when two shapes should be considered the same, as long as you can deform one into the other by stretching and bending — without ripping holes or sticking pieces together. It gets to the heart of many classification problems in physics. 

One strand of Yamashita’s research uses tools from algebraic topology to understand anomalies in quantum field theory and string theory. In other work, she and collaborators showed that certain hidden inconsistencies don’t appear in some quantum theories, using ideas from homotopy theory, a branch of mathematics that studies deep structural relationships.

More simply, she helps determine whether mathematically elegant theories are also internally consistent. 

“I’m interested in connecting homotopy theory and supersymmetric quantum field theory,” she says.

It requires moving back and forth between physical intuition and mathematical rigour, and learning to feel at home in both. It requires listening to the dialects of all the subfields of research at Perimeter and seeking the underlying story they’re all trying to tell. 

“It’s really educating me a lot so far,” she says. “I appreciate being here so much.”