“Math is a necessary evil,” explains Alexis Helgeson. Considering a recent national survey revealed the largest score declines in math in elementary schools since 1990, it is evident that math may not be America’s strong suit. Nor favorite. 

No one knows this better than Helgeson. Her very career as an environmental mathematician places her squarely in front of math aversionists. “People don’t like thinking about [math],” Helgeson admits, adding how most people find her career path confusing. “The attitude I get from a lot of people is that ‘environmental mathematician’ is not even a job title.” Yet Helgeson can not help but try to prove them wrong– “math is a universal language,” relevant to everything people care about, Helgeson explains in earnest.

And like math itself, it seems that Helgeson’s life has always consisted of a litany of proofs to be made.

Helgeson with a turtle. Source: Alexis Helgeson

Growing up, Helgeson dreamed of leaving Earth behind as an astronaut. First as a master’s student at Boston University’s Earth and Environment Department and now, as a research assistant in Yale’s School of the Environment, Helgeson has instead taken to proving that despite the changing scope of Earth’s systems, the key to more accurate global climate predictions is within reach.

How does she bear this burden of proof? It wasn’t always an easy equation for Helgeson to solve. “There’s an assumption that because I’m now involved in academia, I’ve done really well in school, but it’s not always been the case,” Helgeson chuckles, smiling warmly. Nasty teachers, unwelcoming peers, prejudiced spaces. Helgeson has dealt with the worst of academic life, yet she still quips without a hint of sadness “…[academia] is changing a lot right now…I have a lot of hope.”

No one could have handled it as well as Alexis Helgeson. After all, Helgeson told it straight: “I am the smartest person that I know.”

For her, everything came together during her sophomore year at Mount Holyoke. “I was taking discrete mathematics and an intro to ecology class at the same time.” In math, Helgeson had just started learning about group theory, a form of abstract algebra that studies groups. At their simplest, groups consist of sets of numbers with different relationships to one another. A parent set has characteristics that all the subsequent sets will share. 

This theory inspired Helgeson. “All of the different climate measurements are just the subset of a parent set. If we can bring all the pieces of information together, we can identify the shared characters, and begin to get an idea of a true value.” 

Helgeson does not intend on finding one ‘true value’ to fix the anthropogenic climate change ravaging communities across the world. More accurately, Helgeson’s current work focuses on combining data from land and atmospheric CH4 gas measurements to gain a better understanding of just how global methane cycling works. Not so much a true value, but rather, a more accurate numerical representation of environmental patterns of methane.

Considering methane’s importance to climate change as a fierce energy absorber (and therefore atmosphere-heater), such information will fundamentally bolster ecological knowledge. Despite being the second most abundant anthropogenic greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide, methane is chronically underrepresented in the scientific literature. Methane is also one of the few greenhouse gasses with a short lifetime in the atmosphere, meaning that methane reductions today could reduce global temperatures within the next decade. All of this puts Helgeson’s work at the heart of current climate change mitigation strategies.

Helgeson knows that this hunt for her ‘true value,’ or stronger understanding of methane, is a powerful move. The data “…would help to inform…a believable baseline for [methane] emissions of natural systems” that could help with the issuing of methane-credits. Methane-credits are just a spin on carbon-credits: permits to emit greenhouse gasses, which are intended to incentivize economic exchange of CO2, with the ultimate goal of reducing overall emissions efficiently. Building up context-based models of methane is exactly what is needed to make methane-credits the next big economic mitigation tool.

This potential for more accurate and ecologically informed credit-systems proves promising, especially considering Helgeson’s assertion that it is not far off. “The tools are there, and they have been there, but we just need to learn how to use them.” 

And Helgeson is a fast learner. It was actually learning about meteorological forecasting that inspired her prior research at Boston University. Meteorologists’ tried-and-true method of self-informing weather models formed the basis for Helgeson’s unique models, which used data on ecosystem CO2 and H2O gas. 

Essentially, Helgeson was able to take pre-existing data, feed it into her models to create predictions, and then correct those predictions using the next days’ data. Much like how if the weather is predicted to be rain and then it is sunny, this information provides feedback to improve future predictions. Ultimately, Helgeson’s model revealed properties of global carbon and water cycles, and provided a new foundation for future climate models. “This is where…math…is filling in–the gaps.”

So Helgeson’s predictions for the future? “Everything is changing all at once. There’s a lot of cool things happening, and we are realizing that the resources and time spent researching in wealthy countries is not really where we need it.” Helgeson hopes for a future where her research happens not just in America’s northeast, but around the world. As things currently stand, a disproportionate amount of ecological research happens in places like North America and Europe, as opposed to countries at the forefront of climate change such as central Africa and Chad. 

“I have a lot of optimism of what the measurement and data potential is, and the questions we’re going to be able to answer. We need to come together as a [global] community and agree to equitably distribute [research].” Helgeson knows just the way towards global cooperation.

And it all comes back to math. “Math is the most powerful language–it exists outside of everything: ethnicity, race, religion, etc.” Helgeson views math as a powerful tool for the future of not just the climate, but all problems plaguing modern society. “There [can be] infinite ways to solve a problem in math!” she exclaims, before emphatically adding. “It is so beautiful–it could unite us.”

She pauses, momentarily humbled by the power of mathematics. Despite her own awe-inspiring efforts towards climate change mitigation, Helgeson knows that math is not always so well-handled. 

“So many people have stories of people being discouraged from math,” she sighs. Yet it is Helgeson’s firm belief that math–”or statistics, or applied physics, or machine learning, or whatever you want to call it”– is the key to a “shared truth.” 

But Alexis Helgeson remains sympathetic if math still is not quite for you. “I know that when I’m around, people think ‘Oh thank god there’s someone who does like math.’”