As someone that has had an interest in the world around me since early childhood, developing an interest in mathematics has seemed only natural as it is the language of our universe and hence an indispensable tool for illuminating the unknown in our universe. It is my intention to use my knowledge of mathematics to help solve some of humanity’s greatest and oldest problems.
Ever since I was a little boy, I have had a fascination with and curiosity about the world around me. At age <6 I used to create inventions and after I saw David Attenborough’s The Blue Planet at age six, I developed a fascination in nature also. My precise field of interest has varied with the years, but eventually I developed an interest in mathematics due to its immense power to illuminate the unknown. This became apparent to me in my early teens, as I was teaching myself physics and in physics mathematics pops up everywhere. Mathematics is the language we find nature’s laws written in and as such it seems fair to call it the language of the universe. Consequently, understanding mathematics is essential to understanding the world around us. This is why I want to become an applied mathematician and statistician – so that I can apply my knowledge of mathematics to illuminating the unknown and finding solutions to the greatest problems we face as a species.
Specifically, I would like to work as a medical statistician, perhaps even collaborating on research into anti-ageing therapies which have the potential to make it possible for humans to live indefinitely, and as a computational scientist for companies or organisations working on producing a nuclear fusion power plant. I would like to work as a medical statistician partly because medicine has been an interest of mine since I was at least nine years old, when I would read Robbins and Cotran Pathologic Basis of Disease for fun, but also due to the great practical utility and importance of this work. Nuclear fusion has also been one of my interests since I was a preteen, so working on developing a fusion power plant would be of particular interest to me. For those unfamiliar with fusion, it is the source of the Sun’s energy, and it has the potential to offer humanity with a practically boundless, safe, clean, reliable and cheap source of energy with the main source of fuel for nuclear fusion reactors being seawater. Producing a working fusion power plant has been a task that humans have been working on for several decades and while it is clearly a challenge, I like a challenge and would like to help in making it a reality.
Brenton Horne
University of Southern Queensland
