I've been working fairly seriously on public engagement since 2010. It was then that I gave a small collection of talks and workshops with my old friend Hyungju Park sponsored by Kihyong Lee of Interpark Corporation. In particular, I gave a Korean-style 'talk concert' in 2012 that was fairly well-received. These events spurred on the creation of the KAOS Foundation, with generous funding from Interpark, at present the most active supporter in Korea of public engagement activities in the natural sciences. In 2016-17, I was scientific coordinator with Hyungju Park for the programme 'Connecting Insight' sponsored by the Naver Connect Foundation with the goal of organising public lectures and training workshops for teachers as well as developing alternative curricula for schoolchildren. In 2019, Donga Science commemorated its 400th issue by selecting a list of Seven Power Scientists of Korea, in which I was included with special citation of my outreach activities.
I've enjoyed talking about mathematics with non-mathematicians, especially people who imagine themselves to be not very good at it, at least since my teen years. In those days, I was quite bad myself at most kinds of mathematics, but did have exposure to certain aspects of logic, mostly by way of Martin Gardner's columns in the Scientific American. One of them led me to the wonderful book by Raymond Smullyan. As was explained by Gardner, Smullyan's book is actually an introduction to the famous incompleteness theorem of Kurt Goedel that takes the unsuspecting reader to the heart of the subject through a sequence of puzzles. After reading it, I had great fun posing problems about Knights and Knaves, Dracula, and Inspector Craig to friends and relatives. After I started mathematics in earnest, for a long while, my experience with public engagement was intermittent. In the 1990s, when I was teaching in New York city, I was fortunate enough to visit an experimental primary school a few times and speak to young children about shapes. After having my own children, I greatly enjoyed visiting their schools to speak about accessible topics at the level of primary or secondary schools. Given this personal history, it can only be a true pleasure and a privilege to be given ample opportunity to talk about mathematics with people from all walks of life at this point in life.