Quantitative Analysis of the Interdisciplinarity of Applied Mathematics

The increasing use of mathematical techniques in scientific research leads to the interdisciplinarity of applied mathematics. This viewpoint is validated quantitatively here by statistical and network analysis on the corpus PNAS 1999–2013. A network describing the interdisciplinary relationships between disciplines in a panoramic view is built based on the corpus. Specific network indicators show the hub role of applied mathematics in interdisciplinary research. The statistical analysis on the corpus content finds that algorithms, a primary topic of applied mathematics, positively correlates, increasingly co-occurs, and has an equilibrium relationship in the long-run with certain typical research paradigms and methodologies. The finding can be understood as an intrinsic cause of the interdisciplinarity of applied mathematics.