Goal for 20min. presentation at math conference?

Question

I've been invited to give a 20 minute talk at a mathematics conference in a couple months. The audience members all work in my field, so they will be familiar with most of the terminology and background. I have plenty of material to pull from a preprint I've already submitted to journals, and it seems I have two reasonable options:Option A. Present everything to communicate the over-arching theme of my research. I could provide several very minimal proof sketches along the way.Option B. Present one very interesting result (with its lemmas), with more detailed proofs. I could then "sprint" through some related results at the end, or avoid them entirely.Which will be most valuable to the audience members? Which will make me "look the best"?

Answer 1

I'm not a mathematician. However, I have some questions that I hope can help you focus on how to give your presentation.

How interesting is your research to others? How many others are doing something similar? Is this controversial? If the answers to these questions lean negative, then briefly describe your research and detail how you overcame obstacles, or hypotheses that did not turn out as expected. How did you cope with that? Talk about how the "lemmas" are special. What makes them interesting? How do they shed light on your work and the work of others?

Finally, don't stray from your plan. Don't ad-lib jokes (that really doesn't work). Do inject humor into your presentation. PowerPoint is fine, but don't just read the information on a PowerPoint and call it a presentation.

Talk about what interests you the most and make sure that you offer variety in your presentation.

Does that help?