OCEANS MONTH! 145. Dawn Wright | A Divine Abyss

So let's talk about mapping.

I think it's an area of science that a lot of people don't think about, maybe because we live in such a mapped world most of the time.

But road and sidewalk maps aren't the only way we map what's around us.

Can you talk a little bit about modern mapping, how that's contributed to scientific research and maybe some of the most interesting applications right now?

Yes, well mapping is really the science of our world and it is something that people do take for granted, especially now that we have these navigation systems so that technically we are never lost in terms of our spatial coordinates or our spatial awareness, although there can still be some very unfortunate circumstances there.

But the idea of creating a map or understanding how a map is made, what underlies a map, understanding not only that a map is something static that you might look at in an atlas or on the screen.

It's something that is dynamic, ever-changing.

It's something that can make predictions.

in terms of geographic information systems which are essentially smart maps because these are maps that you can ask questions of that you can hypothesize around and that you can do all kinds of calculations with the data that are behind that map even to the point where the answer may not be a map.

It may be a single number.

It may be a parameter.

It may be an equation of some sort.

That is the whole science of mapping that is so exciting.

And I'm so glad to hear that so many universities now have uh... degrees in this area it's often called uh... geographic information science it's the science behind uh...

the original geographic information systems and of the the computer software that's in your phone or in your car, or we like to say that if the package is brown or white, then our technology gets that package to where it needs to go.

So in other words, our company supplies the spatial analytics software to UPS and FedEx and many other companies so that they can navigate and get packages to where they need to be.

So people certainly care about that.

So that's this exciting world that I was able to enter in the early 90s as a student, and now to work for one of the leading companies behind that is very gratifying.

And it is something that is considered a science.

Oftentimes it's considered a meta-science because it integrates all kinds of older sciences in order to innovate and to contribute new knowledge.

So this mapping science, it's part geography, it's part mathematics, it's part statistics, part computer science, and there's so many applications of those basic foundational sciences that you have mapping that is in geology.

It's certainly in oceanography.

It's in chemistry, physics, rocket science.

Certainly it has to be in rocket science.

It's in all the social sciences.

So let's talk about mapping.

I think it's an area of science that a lot of people don't think about, maybe because we live in such a mapped world most of the time.

But road and sidewalk maps aren't the only way we map what's around us.

Can you talk a little bit about modern mapping, how that's contributed to scientific research and maybe some of the most interesting applications right now?

Yes, well mapping is really the science of our world and it is something that people do take for granted, especially now that we have these navigation systems so that technically we are never lost in terms of our spatial coordinates or our spatial awareness, although there can still be some very unfortunate circumstances there.

But the idea of creating a map or understanding how a map is made, what underlies a map, understanding not only that a map is something static that you might look at in an atlas or on the screen.

It's something that is dynamic, ever-changing.

It's something that can make predictions.

in terms of geographic information systems which are essentially smart maps because these are maps that you can ask questions of that you can hypothesize around and that you can do all kinds of calculations with the data that are behind that map even to the point where the answer may not be a map.

It may be a single number.

It may be a parameter.

It may be an equation of some sort.

That is the whole science of mapping that is so exciting.

And I'm so glad to hear that so many universities now have uh... degrees in this area it's often called uh... geographic information science it's the science behind uh...

the original geographic information systems and of the the computer software that's in your phone or in your car, or we like to say that if the package is brown or white, then our technology gets that package to where it needs to go.

So in other words, our company supplies the spatial analytics software to UPS and FedEx and many other companies so that they can navigate and get packages to where they need to be.

So people certainly care about that.

So that's this exciting world that I was able to enter in the early 90s as a student, and now to work for one of the leading companies behind that is very gratifying.

And it is something that is considered a science.

Oftentimes it's considered a meta-science because it integrates all kinds of older sciences in order to innovate and to contribute new knowledge.

So this mapping science, it's part geography, it's part mathematics, it's part statistics, part computer science, and there's so many applications of those basic foundational sciences that you have mapping that is in geology.

It's certainly in oceanography.

It's in chemistry, physics, rocket science.

Certainly it has to be in rocket science.

It's in all the social sciences.