Fermilab, United States
My career in physics started with math. When I was younger, math was recreation for me. There was a famous column in Scientific American for many years called ‘Mathematical Recreations.’ It was fun to play around with numbers. Later, I was thrilled to learn that numbers could be applied to the real world and actually be able to do things! You can connect the time and the motion of things to all these other factors. The dynamics of connecting those things together, it’s still interesting. This will sound terribly geeky, but at a certain point learning calculus and differential equations, it clicked for me in a big way. Now, I particularly like the idea of these large science facilities like DUNE. Contributing to building these one-of-a-kind facilities and seeing them operate and produce science, that’s what keeps me engaged. It’s not the kind of thing that any one person can do, which makes it really challenging and interesting.