Dr. Dan Margalit is a professor of mathematics and the chair of the Department of Mathematics here at Vanderbilt University. Margalit’s research interests lie in low-dimensional topology and geometric group theory. He has received the American Mathematical Society’s L. Conant Prize in 2021, was inducted as a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2019, and was named Sloan Research Fellow in 2009. Dr. Margalit and I talk about how having fun in math can be more important than using it to some end, the beauty of symmetry in nature, and the importance of understanding abstract ideas.