Research Meeting

One of the reasons that MBS is such a wonderful graduate program is the contact that we have with graduate students outside of our specific field of study; not just with people inside our program, but people outside it as well.

For example, my work uses the tools of mathematical logic in mathematical psychology. Another individual in my program (who is beginning a Postdoc in August) uses algebra to investigate media theory, which is the theory of how knowledge is accumulated. And yet another student in our program is looking at psychophysical response times of vision and using differential equations to model his empirically findings about vision. So, the interests of the grad students in the MBS program is quite diverse. But we also are in weekly, if not almost daily, contact with grad students in other programs (economics, cognitive science, management, logic and philosophy of science) who use mathematics to model the social and behavioral sciences. This gives us a very broad, yet somewhat deep understanding of all of the ways that mathematics is being used in the social and behavioral sciences.

This is the beauty of mathematics: if you understand the mathematics, then you can understand the application even if it is in a field you are totally unfamiliar with the subject matter, like say, finance.

This leads me to the weekly summer research lunch meeting that we have. It is informal and no one is under any obligation to go. But since we learn so much from one another during the academic year in seminar and elsewhere, we continue to have contact with one another over the summer to bounce our research ideas off one another. And also to talk about baseball.

To give a sampling of what types of things we talk about see this conference. It was an excellent conference and any outsider would have been truly impressed with the quality of our work.