The Curious Nature of Science Communication: My Summer at <em>Scientific American</em>

A life immersed in science was the only one I could ever envision.Growing up, I spent hours gazing at the stars, identifying constellations, or learning to distinguish birdsongs while exploring the creek behind my house.Each day was-and still is-driven by an endless curiosity.When applying to college, I even selected "other" as my intended major, choosing instead to tell schools that I intended to study everything.Unfortunately, not having a major looks more like studying "nothing," rather than everything.After two years at Cornell, I had taken courses from every STEM major without making meaningful progress towards one specific discipline.Sensing my worry about getting boxed into a field I might eventually tire of, a perceptive undergraduate advisor pointed out an obvious truth: mathematics is the language of the universe.Now in the final year of my PhD in applied mathematics at the University of Maryland, I've had the opportunity to publish research across many of my interestsneuroscience, economics, artificial intelligence, to name a few.Yet throughout graduate school, I've felt the absence of one major component: the chance to share the preposterously cool research in modern mathematics with a wider audience.Each morning, I scroll through arXiv, reading abstracts of groundbreaking work in fields far from my own, always wishing I had the time to delve deeply into the proofs.