If you’re old enough to hum the title of this entry to the tune of “Where in the World is Carmen SanDiego?” then you might be a graduate student…. Okay, so AAAS stands for the “American Association for the Advancement of Science”, and every year this umbrella organization hosts a gigantic conference. This year, I (a graduate student in mathematics) am attending as a blogger and writer for Section A, the mathematics section of the AAAS. Each “section” of AAAS sponsors or co-sponsors symposia that feature work done in its field that its members feel will be easily seen as relevant to other fields, policy-makers, educators, and/or the media. On the whole, biology is the most well-represented field at the conference, but this year there is a lot of math going on. So the answer to the title question is “Everywhere!”. Tomorrow morning I’ll be attending a symposium on Mathematics used across many scales in Biology and in the afternoon I’ll learn about how math can help determine fairness in the political process.
So if you want to get the day-t0-day update on what’s going on and if you’d like to comment on what you’d like to see discussed in future symposia or what you think of the ideas being presented, check out my blog, Mathematically Speaking, which is linked to by the Mathematical Association of America (MAA). Also I would love to know if there are any other math graduate students in attendance at the meeting — let’s meet up!