Sylvia Nickerson (she/her) is a scholar, educator and artist based in Hamilton, Ontario Canada.

Dr. Nickerson began her education at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick with degrees in mathematics and visual art before continuing her studies in history and philosophy of mathematics and science at the University of Toronto’s Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology (IHPST). From 2014-2017 she was a postdoctoral research fellow at York University working on projects Science and Religion: Exploring the Spectrum and the John Tyndall Correspondence. In 2020-2023 she edited the Bulletin of the Canadian Society for History and Philosophy of Mathematics.  

She has taught extensively as an adjunct and Assistant Professor at McMaster University and University of Toronto, offering courses in history of mathematics and the history of the philosophy of mathematics, studies in the conceptual foundations of mathematics, the history of statistics and data visualization, and science communication. She has developed and taught courses in creative non-fiction.

Nickerson illustrated editorials for national newspapers in Canada and the US from 2005-2015. Drawing on her practice of visual art and history, she combined visual and linguistic storytelling into comics examining parenthood, gender, social class and religion in the books Creation (2019) and All We Have Left Is This (2018). During the COVID-19 pandemic she was artist-in-residence at the Art Gallery of Hamilton. She illustrated the children’s book The Time We Met the Mer-One during that time. In 2024 she began donating her work to the collection of Underground and Independent Comics, Comix, and Graphic Novels at the William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections at McMaster University.