Georgetown College. Georgetown University.

Frequent buyer cards, vote counts, polling questions, and research surveys. To Dr. Hans Engler, these are all potential sources of data: information waiting to be shaped and explored.

Through the collection and analysis of data from everyday sources, Engler puts mathematics to the test in the real world. A Professor of Mathematics at Georgetown, Dr. Engler’s classes during the spring semester of 2007 include Mathematics in Society for undergraduates, as well as Data Exploration and Data Mining and a Statistical Consulting Practicum in the graduate program. With Dr. Engler’s guidance, students learn how to use mathematical models to assist in decision-making and negotiation, provide insights into voting methods and election data, and determine the potential and the limits of polling methods.

Dr. Engler also serves as the Director of Graduate Studies for Georgetown’s Master's Program in Mathematics and Statistics, which opened in the Fall of 2006. Dr. Engler intends for the graduate program to expand upon the interdisciplinary focus of the undergraduates program. Working in the Statistical Consulting Practicum, currently a pilot program in the department, students serve as consultants to other Georgetown departments. They reach out to both professors and fellow graduate students to assist in trouble-shooting statistical problems arising in research projects, sometimes developing or recommending innovative ways to analyze research.

Dr. Engler’s graduate students have learned to use sophisticated methods for exploring data in previous classes, and now they have an opportunity to work with professionals who are not statisticians. Working as applied mathematicians, Dr. Engler and his students try to apply mathematical methods to problems in the real world—but they also want to determine the limits of such models and check them against data.

The consulting practicum is informed by Dr. Engler’s extensive consulting background. He has worked with electrical engineers to create more efficient testing methods, he has evaluated cryptography tools, and he has performed statistical consulting for numerous professionals and organizations. Dr. Engler continues to work on a variety of math and statistics projects, both as a consultant and in collaboration with other mathematicians.

Data mining—the process of exploring vast amounts of information collected by a wide variety of companies and organizations, both private and public, for novel patterns—is central to much of Dr. Engler’s current work. Thanks to computer technology, data mining is a rapidly growing field; whether the data involves information from a network of weather stations around the world or a retailer’s records of your DVD rentals, all of the collected numbers require efficient interpretation to be rendered meaningful.

Dr. Engler works to develop innovative and efficient mathematical models to examine such data and constantly looks for common threads behind methods that were often developed for specific purposes by different scientific communities. “In all of this, we’re looking at the mathematics behind each application,” says Engler. “Mathematicians know how to connect different methods to come up with one core approach that can then often be extended to new problems.”

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