Communicating Across Disciplines

“The ass that tries to sit between two chairs ends up on the floor.” Evgeni Fedorovich

I recently gave a talk at my alma mater, the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma. The title of the talk was “Using Mathematics to Understand and Predict the Weather,” and it introduces three simple applications of basic mathematical thinking to problems of interest in meteorology. Putting it together was a lot of fun, and tied together a lot of my experiences in learning the basic ideas and problems of the field, and I try to convey the fact that “I picked it up as I went along” to the audience.

USAO is a liberal arts college, with a very strong focus on interdisciplinary thinking. This is a buzzword, with different meanings depending on the source. What I mean by it is that as a student, I was immersed in an environment that eschewed the traditional practice of extracting a set of disciplinary knowledge and treating it as independent. Instead, our courses were structured so that history, literature, politics, economics, etc were considered different angles of considering “big problems” related to achieving the best life possible for as many of us as possible, and actually in defining what that means.

I’ve thought a lot about my education at USAO. In terms of mathematics, the program was not as strong as if I’d attended OU, simply because it was smaller and had less course offerings. But in a real way that education trained my mind to see big picture connections that would be very difficult to appreciate otherwise.

For example, decisions made by meteorologists have scientific aspects, safety impacts, and economic costs, and all of these things interact with one another. It’s not good enough to know how a hurricane should behave. The problem’s social dimension and associated economic costs that go along with evacuation are as important as where, when and with what intensity the hurricane will make landfall.

Understanding and celebrating the importance of each component, and coming up with balanced solutions (for example, balancing the physical science research with better social understanding for communicating warnings), is what my time at USAO taught me to do. These problems can be tackled individually in a disciplinary setting, but the solutions can really only be implemented with an interdisciplinary focus.