An Interdisciplinary Approach for Tomorrow's Math Majors

January 15, 2008

Arizona State University says that its new interdisciplinary, computational mathematical sciences program is the wave of the future. Thanks to a five-year grant from the National Science Foundation, the university is offering its math majors a set of research projects in 2008 comprising weather and climate forecasting, environmental fluid dynamics, math biology applications, and the modeling of complex supply chains.

The program's goal is for third-year math majors to have two one-year sequences in a physical or life sciences subject that has a connection to their research. In the second year, when they also mentor newcomers to the program, the students will write an honors thesis or research paper and then present the work at a relevant conference.

"Part of the idea is to combine all aspects of coursework into an integrated environment where students are going to feel comfortable using ideas from mathematics, computer science, and science and have the opportunity to apply those ideas during two summer sessions with faculty," ASU's Bruno Welfert said.

Just as important is the fact that "cutting-edge applications are very collaborative," Eric Kostelich said. "If you look, for example, at how to make an MRI machine better, you have to use physics, computer science, engineering — all different disciplines working together to make one machine. With our interdisciplinary curriculum, students can answer questions to common problems and create better applications."

According to Welfert, the teaching of undergraduate mathematics is shifting from the traditional and moving toward an interdisciplinary approach. Still, ASU is one of only about a dozen U.S. institutions offering an undergraduate computational mathematics program.

Source: Arizona State University, Dec. 20, 2007.