Cree Language Game presented at Global Mathematics Conference in Australia

In late July, Dr. Edward Doolittle was among the many invited keynote and guest lecturers who presented at the Global Mathematics Histories and Futures Workshop at the Australian National University, AUS.

The workshop took place from July 20 to 24, 2026, aiming to unite cross-cultural, historical, and frontier mathematical knowledge. It is the first event of its kind in Australian mathematics. 

Dr. Doolittle’s presentation was titled Spot-It with Words from Indigenous Languages

The game is played with 55 cards, each pair of which is known to have exactly 1 symbol in common (of the 8 symbols printed on the cards), and is well-known for its design via a projective plane of order 7. A similar game can be constructed with words, each pair of which has a single letter in common, provided we can find the configuration of a projective plane within a graph constructed of words. In his talk, Associate Professor of Mathematics Dr. Doolittle demonstrated an efficient method for searching for projective plane configurations and related configurations in graphs obtained from dictionaries in various languages, including English, French, and some of the Indigenous languages of Canada, in particular Plains Cree written in Standard Roman Orthography (SRO) and Plains Cree written in Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics.

Following the conference, Dr. Doolittle was invited to spend a week at the Sydney Mathematics Research Institute at the University of Sydney, where he further developed the software and began extending it to Cree Syllabics.

Photo credit: Dr. Edward Doolittle