Abstract: When talking to my peers, I hear similar stories about finding mathematics interesting from a young age or it being their best subject in high school. I didn’t know that I’d be studying a mathematics degree until my second year of university, let alone planning on completing a Master’s degree in pure mathematics! What prompted me to add a maths degree over halfway through my program? As it turns out, abstract mathematics appears in many places in physics—as my summer research project with AMSI illustrates—and this is where my love was first ignited.
Whenever I tell someone that I am studying a maths degree, I often hear response such as, “wow, you must really love maths!” While that’s true now, it wasn’t always the case. I was never particularly bad at maths but I also was never particularly interested in it either. Even going into my senior years of high school, I wasn’t ever considering doing a maths degree. I chose to continue with maths less because I thought it was interesting or useful, but more because I didn’t particularly want to do English. This, inadvertently, was one of the first steps that ended up with me studying pure mathematics at Adelaide University, with the intention of completing a Master’s degree.
Despite not being super interested in maths, I was very interested in physics. Physics describes everything in our universe, from black holes and spacetime to light and subatomic particles. In high school, however, maths wasn’t a core part of the physics curriculum, and I never knew just how essential maths is for physics. You may have heard the saying “physics is just applied maths”—only now do I truly appreciate how true that is. While physics describes everything in our universe, the language it uses to do so is mathematics.
What started as a love of physics has grown now into a love of mathematics itself. Not long (one semester) into my computer science degree, I swapped into a physics degree. Doing a physics degree, I would be required to take more maths courses. Multivariable calculus, linear algebra, differential equations, probability… Taking these maths courses in my second-year opened up my eyes to how beautiful maths itself can be. I found myself fascinated not just by physics, but by the tools with which physics describes the world. This realisation part way through my second year is what finally led me to enrol in a maths degree alongside my physics degree.
Since then, I’ve found myself more and more drawn to weird and interesting fields of maths, where everything can feel so abstract as to sometimes feel pointless—that we only care because otherwise questions would remain unanswered. But, as it turns out, even the most abstract of maths has its place in physics and the more advanced the physics becomes the more pure mathematics becomes relevant. I discovered that maths I thought I’d never use outside my maths degree was appearing in my physics degree! It was this interplay between theoretical physics and pure mathematics that led me to do my summer research scholarship with AMSI on the Hopf fibration.
Now, knowing the roundabout way I discovered how cool and interesting mathematics can be, and what particular aspects of maths made me, personally, fall in love it, I can hopefully connect with students in high school or early university and show them a different perspective—one that sparks an interest in higher mathematics that perhaps the school system can fail to do.
Nyx Crosby
The University of Adelaide
