Dr. Eduardo González says new faculty members need to find a true balance of their obligations: quality teaching, service and scholarship.
“I was always trying to do what felt right because I never had that influence,” says González. He found his way into a science-oriented high school, where he fell in love with mathematics and physics. He enrolled in a Mexican college that also specialized in science and technology.
A Mexican mathematician who completed his Ph.D. in the United States helped González understand in the late ’90s that he too needed to follow that path in order to be on the cutting edge of math. Gonzalez arrived at Stony Brook University in 1999 and plunged into his doctoral studies.
González has emerged exactly where he wanted to be, doing high-level research on theoretical math that has attracted the attention of his peers and federal grantmakers.
“What I do is pure mathematics with applications toward physics,” says González, who arrived at the University of Massachusetts Boston in 2008 as an assistant professor of mathematics.
González’s research involves math several levels beyond calculus. His work does not have immediate practical applications, but neither did Newton’s discovery of gravity. González’s specialty is trying to understand how objects exist in a theoretical space with 10 dimensions instead of three. The answer could have universal meaning.
“For instance, a basic question is, What is the shape of the universe?” González asks. “Does it make sense that the universe has any shape at all?”
