Mathematics for Humanity: a Plan
Posted by John Baez
I’m working with an organization that may eventually fund proposals to fund workshops for research groups working on “mathematics for humanity”. This would include math related to climate change, health, democracy, economics, etc.
I can’t give details unless and until it solidifies.
However, it would help me to know a bunch of possible good proposals. Can you help me imagine some?
A good proposal needs:
a clearly well-defined subject where mathematics is already helping humanity but could help more, together with
a specific group of people who already have a track record of doing good work on this subject, and
some evidence that having a workshop, maybe as long as 3 months, bringing together this group and other people, would help them do good things.
I’m saying this because I don’t want vague ideas like “oh it would be cool if a bunch of category theorists could figure out how to make social media better”.
I asked for suggestions on Mathstodon and got these so far:
figuring out how to better communicate risks and other statistical information,
improving machine learning to get more reliable, safe and clearly understandable systems,
studying tipping points and ‘tipping elements’ in the Earth’s climate system,
creating higher-quality open-access climate simulation software,
Each topic already has people already working on it, so these are good examples. Can you think of more, and point me to groups of people working on these things?