If you pour a liter of water in an already half filled two liter bottle, you’ll usually fill it up completely. But what if the bottle wasn’t filled with liquids, but with sand and air? The mathematics you need to calculate such processes is complex and requires a so-called multiscale approach: calculating the interactions between objects with vastly different sizes. In his research, Ph.D. candidate Omar Richardson is developing a mathematical framework to analyze these and other multiscale systems. In our conversation, Omar explains how and why we do mathematical research, and describes some practical implications of his work. Omar Richardson’s licentiate thesis can be downloaded from DiVA: Mathematical analysis and approximation of a multiscale elliptic-parabolic system