S-STEM Scholar Joshua Clugston's Blog

1. One year, five years, ten years from now, I hope to be in graduate school working toward higher education which helps me obtain a position that requires mathematical research of some kind. I hope that during that time I will be able to figure out exactly what kind of research I am capable of, which in turn should help shape the way that the future is following that. Depending where I end up, the possibilities of impact may be seemingly countless. For instance, I have research interests in both pure and applied mathematics, which if combined, could open up the possibility of answering and posing new, exciting questions with fruitful implications. My curiosity has motivated me up until this point to look toward these things in particular, as I feel that, if I should reach that aforementioned point in my life, I will have the tools to develop answers to problems that have been crippling to our communities in some respect or another.  2. I feel that we have some serious social issue...

Three years ago I was not majoring in Applied Mathematics, so my knowledge of my current field at the time was likely very limited. Although, if I were to guess what knowledge I had around that time (considering this was three years ago and I don't recall too clearly what I did and did not know during that time), I would probably guess that I thought that all mathematicians did was count really high, along with other things that were seemingly useless from my outsider perspective. While I have learned that this is partially true (excluding the "useless" part), as I have often experienced that some advanced mathematics requires some form of counting - often enough to very large numbers (in particular, partitions, Mersenne  primes, etc.).  Surprisingly, these things often do have very strong applications in the real world. For instance, Mersenne primes are very useful in cryptography; while, on the other hand, partition functions might still not have any distinct applicatio...