I'm in the R&W group with Lonna, Marissa and Marlon, and it's been great - they've all been very committed and organized, and it's been a fun experience. The biggest challenge has been how to incorporate the research interests and perspectives of Marissa and myself, since both of us are interested in different areas of theoretical mathematics. This is still an issue, and I for one am still unsure of whether it is in fact possible to unite pure math with the social sciences in any way that is either innovative mathematically or significant with regard to the social sciences. A mathematician who seeks to contribute to other fields (especially those outside the natural sciences) usually becomes an engineer or a statistician very quickly - not that there is anything wrong with that (certainly not!), but the simple fact is that there are other people who are trained for this and who can do it much more effectively. I am somewhat suspicious that trying to incorporate theoretical math into research in the social sciences will end up making the math more obscure without making any meaningful contribution to the social sciences.
However, our research group has been extremely committed, and I'm hopeful that we've found a way to move forward. Our goal now is to use real analysis and the theory of metric spaces as a way to produce insights into the likelihood of young students from under-represented minorities to be interested in STEM fields. This was somewhat inspired by the readings (I'll look up the exact reference later) which described the use of metrics to measure the "inter-disciplinarity" of a paper. I think this may be a way to truly bring our different disciplines together in a meaningful way, and I'm proud of our team for seeing the potential in this idea.
peace,
EJ
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.
"A mathematician who seeks to contribute to other fields (especially those outside the natural sciences) usually becomes an engineer or a statistician very quickly"
ReplyDeleteI feel that I face the same engineer problem as a physicist. I dislike the term "STEM," because it jams together different fields with different value systems into a single, commoditized unit.
I am definitely curious now, though, as to how you are planning to use real analysis in a social context.
Sounds interesting, EJ!
ReplyDeleteI've been mulling over the use of metrics in my family project as well.