What's the word for someone who studies partial differential equations?
Mathematics has many words for the people who specialise in particular subdisciplines:
- geometers, who study geometry
- algebraists, who study algebra
- combinatorialists, who study combinatorics
- probabilists, who study probability
- statisticians, who study statistics
- analysts, who study analysis
- ???, who study partial differential equations
Partial differential equations (PDEs) is a large field in mathematics, with many people working in it. It would be nice to have a word by which to refer to those people, along with all the other words for people in other parts of maths.
What is the noun for a person who studies PDEs?
Example sentence:
The conference will be of interest to all manner of analysts: measure theorists, numerical analysts, functional analysts, and [???].
Solution 1:
Not all areas of mathematics produce specialist terms for their researchers, and even if they do, I do not think many of the researchers will spontaneously use these terms to describe themselves. I think people will find it more natural to say "I'm in computational algebra" (or, more formally, "I work/do research in computational algebra") than "I'm a computational algebraist", for example. This in particular if that particular area name comes with a modifier (such as functional: a functional analyst can mean so many things, and often has nothing to do with research in math). Also, the former description draws attention to the area rather than the person, which people may find preferable.
So normally I think people working in PDEs would shortly say "I'm in PDEs".
Should the necessity to apply short labels to specialists in various areas of mathematics arise, a neutral descrption would be a PDE researcher (or more informally, PDE guy; no idea what girls resort to in the circumstances!).