When on the journey to becoming someone I have never been, I have to do hard things I’ve never done.  I consider earning a PhD to be in this catagory.  In the iconic words of my father:

“A PhD proves that you can do something really hard for a really long time.”

So, as I work 12+ hours days everyday of the week I’d like to say, “I’ve never worked this hard before!”  But I can’t honestly say this. In my previous career I was frequently working more hours and sleeping less.  However, after a year and a half of graduate school, I claim sitting on your butt and thinking can be just as difficult as the most hectic job.

Mathematics is a lesson in frustration.  For you see, mathematicians live for those little (and big) “ah ha!” moments.  This is the proverbial red pill of mathematics.  If you struggle through the confusion, then you can see beautiful logic unfold before you.   Then, the higher up in mathematics you get- the longer the periods of confusion are.  Then you start to relish the challenge more than the completed problem, then you are on your way to becoming a mathematician.  We repeatedly throw ourselves against the things we don’t understand.  We actually feel angry when the professor sets problems which are too easy.  Can you believe that?  We are angry that the problems aren’t complicated enough!  This is how dedicated we are to the idea of hard work.  Later in our careers we go looking for really awful problems and we develop beautiful sayings like:

The problems worthy of attack are the ones that fight you back.

So the next time you are disapointed with your job, just imagine throwing yourself repeatedly agianst a blackboard all day.  And if that image strikes your fancy- you are (or ought to be) a mathematician.

Earlier last week I took an exam which does not meet my expectations of an exam.  The exam went far beyond the material covered in class while also having a wild variety of questions ranging from infantile to impossible.   We also had a trick question in the exam.  really?  Was that necessary?

I felt very betrayed mostly because one of the beliefs I held as a student was completely shattered in that moment.

I used to believe the professor was on my side.

However, the professor is not looking out for my learning like I would want him too.  In educational psychology I learned that if you wanted students to achieve, you needed to be transparent with your teaching.  That is: teach what you want them to learn and then test them on what you taught.  Don’t test them on extrapolating to broader contexts.   Doing this will not grade their abilities on the subject, but rather on their abilities as a critical thinker.  Which is fine.  If you want them to critically think- then train them to do so.  But, for example (Oh, imaginary teacher for whom I’ll never have the guts to tell this to in real life) do not give students computational problems all year long and also expect them to take abstract derivatives on the exam.  Students will not be able to do it with the training you gave them.

Anyways, I have mostly recovered from this incident, but I don’t think I’ll ever be the same.  I’m glad I’m almost done with the timed exam taking part of my life.  I’ll be glad to have that behind me.

I am busy taking my graduate math courses and I’m also taking an introductory level science course on the atmosphere and meteorology.  I am doing this because I would like to work with climate modeling.  I was chatting with a casual friend, who is also a mathematician, who asked me:

“why are you doing mathematics to work on climate change? why not just do science?”

My initial response sounded something like, “…cause I like math…”   But I realized I would be approached with this question repeatedly over my life and I should find a good answer.  My roommate and I have a saying, “Math + Science = WIN.”  We both believe this so intuitively that we never discussed why this equation would be true.  I’m going to try to do that now.

The Shodor Education Foundation developed an online simple climate model we are using in my science class.  They have an excellent page about creating models.   Scientists model things when they happen too fast for observation, they are unsafe to experiment on, or in the case of the climate, we  just can’t  several experiment on the global system.  As a result, the scientists make models to let them run experiments.  When scientists model something they have to ask one very important question, “How do we know the model is right?”  This is where the mathematicians can really help.

Mathematicians know a lot about models, and we know what kind of things models should do if they are robust.  We can look at the original equations of the model to see that they make mathematical sense.  As the models get more complicated, the scientists need more mathematicians to figure out if things are working together correctly or not.  So as a combined effort, the mathematicians can really support the science by using their abstract knowledge on a specific model.

And that’s one reason why math + science = WIN.  I’m sure there are more reasons, and perhaps better reasons.  Can you think of any?