What is a Mathematician, Really?

I adopt the title from Hersh's book, "What is Mathematics, Really?" I found the book in the math library when I was an undergrad and since I like the book so much, I bought it when I was taking my PhD in a subject that has nothing to do with math, or so I thought. I think my learning process is always about finding meaning. If I didn't get why I should do a particular subject, my grades would just fall down the drain. That's why I changed my subject from abstract mathematics to social science. Along the way, I re-learned statistics and programming again as part of my research and somehow, I realized that the way I am attracted towards math is part of a bigger attraction, pattern.

Mathematics is a form of pattern and since it works through definition, I can have one of the purest form of pattern. When I was an undergrad, my final project was about the convergence of Lax-Friedrichs scheme in approaching a continuous formula with partial differential equation. The author of the main paper that I built my final project from is a woman. So reading about her kind of me motivated me to keep going (after being told by my supervisor). I did the same for Calculus, I finished reading all the mathematicians stories that start each chapter in Purcell's book.

My training kind of shaped the way I approached social science. I like to create a social model by defining the rules first. It's like creating a natural number or a space. The way we understand the world is through a lens or a framework. It allows us to become sensitive to different things, depends on the lens. At the same time, failure in understanding the lens also means failure in what it disallow us to see. In math, I see this as a form of transformation where one space may be more effective in solving one problem than the other. We can only say this once we understand the space we are working in. In social science, it's less clear than math and therefore, many people may not see it as an epistemological problem. They confuse truth with situated knowledge.