Written by Andreas Mono, Ph.D.
Hi there! I am a postdoc at the Department of Mathematics working under the supervision of Professor Larry Rolen since August 2023. Vanderbilt provides an excellent work environment, a fantastic community, and wonderful experiences since I have begun to work here. I am very delighted to be a small part of Vanderbilt’s mission and having the opportunity to contribute to it. Most visibly, I taught classes and mentored several students at undergraduate level during each semester since I started my program. I realized early on that teaching here works differently compared to my own time as a student at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, or as a graduate student in Cologne, Germany. I am very grateful for a lot of support from my students as well as from my department during my transitional phase, and teaching continues to be a very rewarding part of my time at Vanderbilt.
In many conversations, I got the question what research in mathematics is about. Well, I view mathematics more as a subfield of philosophy rather than of the natural sciences, since I can’t ask nature whether my claims are actually true. Instead, we have developed a more or less formal language to abbreviate our usual language, which makes it more efficient to capture phenomena precisely. Nevertheless, we define objects and establish deductions using certain rules similar to philosophy, it just looks different at first glance. My research is within number theory, one of the oldest (and most beautiful in my opinion) areas of mathematics. Number theory is famous for its easy to state but very hard to prove theorems, such as Fermat’s last theorem, better known by Fermat’s quote “I have discovered a truly marvelous proof, which this margin is too narrow to contain”. And this is not the only example, some of the open problems have a bounty of a million dollars or go back to the ancient Greeks.
Other than mathematics, I love to hang out with friends, read, hike, or play chess. Thanks for having me here!