Visiting British Mathematician at ASU Takes Part in Math Awareness Month Activity

May 4, 2009

"Math Awareness Month actually used to be a week, but there's been inflation," observed Wayne Raskind, director of the School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences at Arizona State University (Tempe). Visiting mathematician Julian Hunt (University of Cambridge) had the time and inclination, therefore, to deliver a public lecture on math and climate change, which was the subject of this year's Math Awareness Month.

"The use of mathematics has enabled many important discoveries to be made and decisions to be taken." Hunt said. For instance, "If you're plotting the temperature," he said, "over the last 10 years, it has remained more or less flat."

Over the last half century, however, the temperature has been rising. "The objective is that we should be able to do something about it by reducing the amount of carbon dioxide and other emissions," Hunt said.

"One of the practical solutions is to be monitoring what's happening to the climate," Hunt suggested, by taking measurements at ground level and from satellites. "If we have science and math, we choose the object or area that we're concerned with," he said. "We have to consider the aspects of those in order to do calculations."

"The more applications I see that math is applied to, the more interest I can gain in math," said undergraduate Vivek Singh, who attended Hunt's lecture.

Another attendee, Garth Baughman, an economics senior who volunteered to help with the school's Math Awareness Month events, said, "It's about personal connections, about the community around the math department and helping to support that community."

During April 2009, visiting mathematician Julian Hunt had done his part.

Source: ASUWebDevil, April 20, 2009.