By Qianyi Jiang, Niharika Nirankari, Monica Morales Hernandez

Undergraduate students often experience mathematics as a sequence of courses centered on technique, correctness, and speed. Research, when it appears at all, usually shows up later — after students have racked up enough credentials to be granted permission to ask questions. This structure privileges speed, prior access, and confidence over curiosity and reflection, and it quietly shapes who is seen as belonging in mathematics. For many students, especially those from historically excluded groups, research ends up feeling distant, elite, and inaccessible rather than a natural part of mathematical learning.

The three of us have noticed something else, though. When students are invited into the research process early — through questions they already care about — the barrier drops fast. Early research experiences let students encounter mathematics as a discipline shaped by questions, interpretation, and context, not as a fixed set of procedures. But the word research still carries an intimidating weight. This is where pop culture earns its place. Films, television, music fandoms, and the cultural narratives that shape how mathematicians are imagined — these are entry points that lower the initial barrier without lowering intellectual expectations.

Using pop culture this way is a deliberate teaching choice, not an attempt to make mathematics less rigorous. When we work with cultural artifacts students already know and care about, we invite them into research through analysis, questioning, and interpretation rather than through technical mastery alone. The signal is: research begins with curiosity and critical engagement, not with credentials. The question shifts from am I good enough to do research? to what patterns are here, and how can mathematics help me make sense of them?

One example of this shift comes from bringing pop culture narratives directly into classroom discussions and public talks. In a recent talk Monica gave, she used the global cultural phenomenon of BTS as a starting point — a fandom most students in the room could describe in more detail than they could describe a research paper. From there, the talk turned into something more mathematical: the focus was data visualization — how to take streaming counts, chart trajectories, and album-level data and represent them in ways that actually let you see something. Which encoding to pick, what to put on which axis, when a comparison is honest and when it is flattering, what gets lost when you aggregate. Students who might not have walked into a talk titled “data visualization” were suddenly comfortable asking why one chart felt clearer than another, and what a particular graph was quietly choosing not to show. Similar projects ask students to interrogate statistical claims in media, analyze how mathematicians are portrayed on screen, or explore the mathematics embedded in artistic and cultural artifacts. The bridge is the same in every case: pop culture opens the door, and mathematics waits on the other side.

This approach also gives students room to push back on the stories mathematics tells about itself. Popular media tends to portray mathematicians as isolated geniuses or emotionally detached figures, reinforcing the idea that mathematical success is innate, rare, and reserved for a few. In our own ongoing work, we have been using media representations of mathematicians as a site for analysis, asking what cultural narratives get reproduced and whose stories get left out. Through work like this, students start to see mathematics not only as a tool for calculation but as a tool for critique. They also start to see themselves as people who get to decide whose stories are told.

From the student side, early exposure to research builds the confidence to engage with more advanced methods — machine learning, classification, clustering — that can otherwise feel reserved for students with extensive mathematical backgrounds. Introduced in isolation, those tools can feel inaccessible. Embedded inside a question students actually care about, the same tools become things worth fighting through the documentation for. Work in this vein opens naturally into text classification, clustering, and other methods students reach for because the question pulled them there, not because a syllabus told them to. That is the shift we are after.

Ultimately, the goal of bringing students into research early is not to accelerate them through content. It is to expand their sense of belonging and possibility within mathematics. Pop culture, used well, says something quietly important: your questions count, the things you already pay attention to are worth thinking about mathematically, and you do not have to wait for permission to begin. When students learn that early, mathematics stops being a gatekeeper and starts being an open door.

Qianyi Jiang is an interdisciplinary undergraduate researcher at Adelphi University. Her areas of interest are quantitative policy analysis, particularly digital and educational inequalities.

Niharika Nirankari is a BSc Mathematics student with a minor in Computer Science at Adelphi University. She is passionate about astronomy, mathematics, and physics, with a strong interest in exploring the vastness of the universe and seeking to understand the seemingly unknowable.

Monica Morales Hernandez is an applied mathematician and associate teaching professor at Adelphi University whose interests include numerical analysis, data science for mathematical sociology, math education and the history of mathematics.