Office Hours: Tour de Force Assistant professor of mathematics Sybil Prince Nelson ’01 finds meaning in all her endeavors.

Assistant professor of mathematics Sybil Prince Nelson ’01 has always been drawn to writing, so much so that she entered Washington and Lee University as an English and journalism double major. But sitting in her first math class in Chavis Hall — calculus — she realized how much she enjoyed it, thanks to her “amazing” professor, Paul Bourdon. He encouraged her to take another math class, so she did. And another, and another. Soon, she’d switched both majors completely — to music and mathematics.

“When he taught a math problem, he was just so enthusiastic about not only what the math could do but what it revealed about the world,” she says.

Connecting the Dots

A multi-instrumentalist in high school, Nelson continued playing the double bass and saxophone in the University Orchestra and Jazz Band and Wind Ensemble. Today, she plays in the Rockbridge Symphony Orchestra. For Nelson, there is a clear overlap between math and music. Her Spring Term course on Statistics in Korean Music focuses on Benford’s Law, a logarithmic distribution of first numbers that emerges in datasets ranging from popular music to tax forms.

Nelson’s research is focused on creating tree-based models for classifying and predicting outcomes from complex data. Last summer, she studied the entire Beatles’ catalogue of more than 200 songs, searching for Benford’s Law distribution, and discovered the majority of their songs fall in line. The most Benford song in the dataset? “Let it Be.”

“My goal is to have my students understand math in a different way and to realize that it has such an impact on every aspect of your life,” she says. “Anything in the world around
us that is beautiful and that we enjoy, it all has some sort of mathematical context.”

Following the Stories

As she was getting her Ph.D. in biostatistics at the Medical University of South Carolina, she relied on a familiar stress-reliever: writing. If she got stuck during her research, she’d start working on a book. And if she ever got writer’s block, she’d switch back to mathematical concepts. In the six years it took Nelson to get her degree, she wrote 12 books.

“It’s what I tell my students as well: You might come up with a problem that you think is impossible, but when you walk away from it, your brain keeps working on it as you’re doing other things,” she says. “Sometimes I’ll wake up in the middle of the night with an answer to a math problem or a plot point in something I’m writing.”

A prolific author, Nelson has published more than 30 books including historical romances under her pseudonym, Leslie DuBois, as well as the “Jane Austen in Space” and “Priscilla the Great” series. A middle-grade series, “Priscilla the Great” follows a young girl who discovers she has superpowers. And “Jane Austen in Space” is a sci-fi homage to one of Nelson’s favorite genres — Brit lit.

“In high school, I was the biggest British literature fan; I loved Jane Austen. I loved Thomas Hardy. But there are not many people who look like me in British literature,” she says. “With the ‘Jane Austen in Space’ series, I was like, ‘What can I do to have that same story but to have some diversity?’ So, it takes place in space on another planet where humans are actually the minority.”

Nelson, who is currently working on three books, says she has more ideas than she has time to write, but she devotes the early-morning hours between 5 and 8 a.m. to her craft. Usually she doesn’t outline a book beforehand; generally, a scene will just pop into her head, and after getting it on paper, she fills in the rest of the plot around it.

“Being able to write in different genres, I feel like they feed into each other,” she says. “There’s something about sci-fi that I really love, because you can comment on society without hammering your point. I just love all the different things you can do and how creative you can be.”

This article first appeared in the Spring 2025 issue of W&L: The Washington and Lee Magazine. Contact us at magazine@wlu.edu.