Math Research: How Does it Work? | Campus - The UTD Mercury

Take an inside look at how UTD's mathematical scientists operate, solve problems using high dimension math, explains, according to Breanna Shen, Mercury Staff.  

Photo: Shubechhya Mukherjee, Mercury Staff

When people think of research, they imagine a scientist in a white lab coat pipetting chemicals or culturing cells on a petri dish. But when asked to consider “math research,” what comes to mind? What does pure math research entail?

This fall, the School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics inducted seven new tenured and tenure-track faculty. Among them, Baris Coskunuzer and Stephen McKeown conduct research in math, while Qiwei Li conducts statistics research.

“Pure mathematicians are not really interested in the real-life applications,” Coskunuzer said. “They are trying to solve nice puzzles, which give you interesting relationships between objects.” 

Coskunuzer got his first taste of math as a high schooler in Turkey, where he enjoyed classes in abstract math. He majored in math in college, and as a Ph.D. student at Caltech, his advisor introduced him to geometric topology... 

In contrast with pure math research, Li said, statistics research centers on application, especially in medicine or biology.

“Statistics is the science about data, because the data can reveal lots of interesting things about the body and the world,” Li said...

Li uses Bayesian statistical tools to draw conclusions in two areas of application, digital pathological images and microbiomes, which are collections of microorganisms, using both data and prior knowledge. High resolution images of pathological tissues can be analyzed by a deep learning AI to identify different types of cells, Li said. The patterns of cells are statistically quantified and used to predict patient survival outcome.
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Source: The UTD Mercury