Today marks the 2023 Innovation Expo, a culmination of sorts for the seniors at Stevens who have worked for the past school year on design or thesis projects. The university treats today with lots of fanfare and excitement, a chance to showcase how their academic programs provide their students with the skills to complete and present innovative projects across STEM, along with the humanities, arts, and social sciences.
Today excites me, however, for its preponderance of mathematics. In previous years, I loved shuffling from one poster board to the next and learning about the math at work in pretty much all the Expo projects. This math is sometimes subtle, but it lays the foundation for the day and moreover provides a common language for everyone to gain an appreciation of their fellow students’ work.
I’ll be situated at the math and physics section of the Expo, where some of my good friends and I will have posters on numerical methods for partial differential equations, fragmentation problems (which involve the breaking of one object into multiple objects, like in an explosion), and optical fiber laser amplifiers. These have a hefty deal of math, but that should not deter you from stopping by — the applications of these works are manifold and significant.
But math in projects from the School of Engineering and Sciences doesn’t stop there — far from it! A Chemistry & Chemical Biology project characterizing liquids in e-cigarettes involves principal component analysis, a mathematical technique for pulling out important statistics from large data sets. Biomedical Engineering has produced projects on implant-based treatment, which requires its own share of data analysis and modeling of the brain and body before the implant can be constructed.
If Computer Science is your thing, you can find projects on 5G cybersecurity and transit planning — the former utilizes the introduction of noise to learn more about 5G networks (this noise trick is a common mathematical tool), while the latter is the traveling salesman problem at work, with some exciting additions. Likewise, for Mechanical Engineering, the “ARGOS” projects give work-from-home employees a way to better communicate over virtual calls, involving data sensors and moving outputs.
What about the other schools? Naturally, they have their fair share of math too — the School of Systems and Enterprises has applied machine learning or AI to many of its projects, from a system of pesticide distribution to an auditory app that aids people with visual impairments. The School of Business features time-series analysis, stochastic modeling, and principal component analysis across several of its research projects. Even in the soon-to-be-renamed College of Arts & Letters, you can find projects utilizing animation, music technology, and quantitative data to produce brilliant art and theses with powerful arguments to consider in the social sciences.
Some of these connections to mathematics may seem like a stretch, but I truly believe that if you go to any one of the tables at the Expo today and start asking questions, you and the seniors who’ve worked on these projects will find them. It is a good example of math’s inherence — it is all around us, just waiting to be found and harnessed.
Of course, even if I got to write every article in the Stute this week, I wouldn’t have enough space to cover all the amazing work of the members of the Class of 2023 that will be on display today. The projects I referenced are merely snippets, and even those I covered with one- or two-sentence blurbs, so again, I encourage you to go and see for yourselves just how innovative—and mathematical—this day is. It’s a chance for us seniors to take one step closer to graduation and share our hard work, while the rest of campus can take note and inspiration as they think about their encounters with math in future Expo projects.
