Mathematics faculty member Linda Green teamed up with graduate research consultant Connor Menzel to teach an interdisciplinary data analysis class.
Editor’s note:
In the following stories on “Creative Collaborators,” we highlight the innovative spirit and impactful work of faculty and student collaborators in research, teaching and community engagement in the College of Arts and Sciences. Read about a UNC geographer and her team who examined the effects of the construction industry on Ecuadorian river communities, a faculty-led student group that advised a Durham-based nonprofit on community disaster response and a graduate student research consultant who provided expertise to an interdisciplinary undergraduate data analysis class.
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Let’s face it: Navigating modern life demands some basic numbers know-how.
That is why Linda Green, teaching associate professor in the department of mathematics, developed the course “Reasoning With Data: Navigating a Quantitative World.” Instead of relying on textbook problems, Green introduces undergraduate students to data analysis scenarios rooted in society and current events.
“The course is designed with several modules,” said Green. Students use math to explore topics including gerrymandering, the COVID-19 pandemic, finance, authorship and writing.
The course is popular among non-math majors to fulfill the University’s quantitative reasoning focus capacity in the IDEAs in Action curriculum, and it is cross-listed in biology, psychology and neuroscience, and statistics and operations research. Green helped develop the course with faculty members Todd Vision, Viji Sathy and Jeff McLean.
In spring 2024, it got an extra dose of engagement when Green was paired with mathematics Ph.D. student Connor Menzel through the Graduate Research Consultant Program in the Office for Undergraduate Research.
“The idea is that this is a class about math in the real world, about looking at real-world data and seeing what we can actually say, quantitatively, about it,” Menzel said.
But that type of data can become outdated quickly. Green tasked Menzel with gathering updated data sets for the students to use, including recent voting and district data from North Carolina and other states.
Green gives students a choice between several research questions for their final project. One example was developing an algorithm by which a streaming service like Spotify could recommend new artists by quantitatively analyzing articles about candidate artists. They could also compare current and proposed Durham school districts on measures of “fairness” based on socioeconomic characteristics.
A graduate research consultant bridges the gap
Menzel helped to design one of the final project questions, a particularly complex one — determining who the most likely creator of bitcoin was by analyzing computer code.
Satoshi Nakamoto is the pseudonym of the person or persons attributed with inventing the cryptocurrency. But controversies over its creation — and who is behind the pseudonym — endure.
“There are a few people who the public thinks could have written bitcoin,” Menzel said. “So, I collected a lot of writing samples and designed a project so the students could figure out who the most likely author was.”
Menzel was also a valuable resource to the students, meeting with them to answer questions about their projects.
“It can sometimes be a little intimidating for students to ask what they may think is a ‘dumb’ question,” Menzel said. “If they wanted to ask really general questions, they could. If they wanted to ask more detailed questions, like Why is my code not running? I could help with that as well.”
“The unreasonable efficiency of mathematics in science is a gift we neither understand nor deserve.”
— Physicist Eugene Wiger, The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics
Applications in the real world
When dealing with textbook math problems, Green says that learners are typically given all the information they need.
“But the real world is not like that. Frequently, all the pieces that you need just aren’t there,” she said.
Figuring out what information to gather is part of the process. Another part is learning what tools are needed to analyze the data, such as Python for programming or spreadsheets.
“The majority of the students who take this course would not describe themselves as ‘math people,’” Menzel said. “But every student I talked to seemed to be pretty engaged with this course. I think that students find it nice when the math is directly relevant to their lives.”
And that is entirely the point, according to Green.
“I think it’s important to arm these students with some ability to think through and analyze data before we send them off into the world. This course gives them at least a sense of how quantitative tools are used in data analysis,” Green said.
The added partnership with Menzel is what truly made the course shine, she added.
“Having the graduate research consultant there makes it possible to have students work on research projects in a large class,” Green said. “That is what made it feasible.”
By T. DeLene Beeland