My inter-disciplinary experience has been rich and very enjoyable, but I don't feel as if I have been able to use the skills of a mathematician during this project. Though I still have hopes that this will change, so far this experience has been less than ideal in that respect. Tying the data sets we are working with into some interesting mathematical structure has been a significant challenge.
However, in my independent research project, I've been working with a function which is a direct result of inter-disciplinary work. Brownian motion is a function in probability which models the random movement of particles suspended on the surface of liquids, it was discovered by a biologist and is now a major part of countless work in applied math and stochastic processes. The problem I've been working on is tied closely to this function, which serves as a consistent reminder to me of the potential of inter-disciplinary work, even in the stratified reaches of mathematics.
This is a space where UIUC SPI participants in the Summer 2013 Research Methods and Writing Seminar engage each other as researchers, intellectuals and members of a cross disciplinary knowledge producing community.
Oh, cool, I've studied that on occasion. Brownian motion is a big thing in statistical mechanics.
ReplyDeleteAnd for the beginning of your post... yeah. I'm kind of glad that my family has such an open-ended topic - it means I can do a lot of reading. Attacking a dataset outright sounds harder/riskier, since you don't know when or what you will find.
DeleteHey EJ! I am hoping that our project comes together well! Lol
ReplyDelete