Trachette Jackson: For me, I think, when you talk to people who are doing mathematics as their career, they often start with, “I was always good at math.” That was true of me, but I never thought of pursuing it as a career. I just thought it was something that I liked and that I was good at, until I got to college. I wasn’t even majoring in math. One of the professors in the math department actually called me to his office and said, “you’re taking all these classes, and you’re doing really well. I think you should major in math.” And I said, “I’m majoring in engineering.” And he said, “No, you really need to change your major to math.” And we had this conversation, and it was almost like an invitation to join the discipline. Even as an undergraduate, not really knowing what that meant, it felt like I was extended this really wonderful invite to try this, to see if I could do this, to see if I could love this. So that kind of invitation to the discipline, I think, really helped shift the direction I was going in. Since then, it’s sort of been like, what area? I knew math was what I was going to do, and figuring out what area came a little bit later. I was going down a very pure math track. I thought I might end up going to graduate school and studying some very pure math topics for a long time.
The second story of the change of direction in my life was seeing flyers around my math department walls saying that someone was coming to visit, and he was going to tell us how the leopards got their spots, using math. And I kept seeing this poster, and every time I walked past it, I would just shake my head. There’s no way math has anything to do with that! And so I went and sat in on the talk, and I didn’t understand much. I was still an undergraduate. But what I took away was that mathematics has the potential to really understand biological phenomena and make a difference in how biologists view their experiments and the theories that they’re making. That was the “aha” moment for me, that mathematical biology was going to be my field.
Read the full interview with University of Michigan mathematical biologists Trachette Jackson and Victoria Booth at Roots of Unity.
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