From Antiquity to AI: Mathematics, Medicine, and the Black Box Problem

When
September 21, 2026
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location
2100 E 71st Street Indianapolis, IN 46220
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Speaker: David Gunderman

Medicine has long relied on numbers, formulas, and models to classify patients, predict risk, and guide decisions. Machine learning and AI have made these tools more powerful, but also more opaque: physicians and patients may rely on outputs without fully understanding how they were produced or what assumptions they contain. Is this opacity a new problem, or part of a much longer history of medicine’s trust in mathematics? Drawing on examples from the four humors to modern AI, this talk explores how mathematical models shape real clinical decisions and patient lives. Questions that may seem purely technical, such as measurement, modeling, thresholds, and prediction, also turn out to be questions about ethics, communication, bias, and responsibility.

David Gunderman is an incoming resident physician at Ascension St. Vincent Hospital in Indianapolis and a future dermatologist whose work brings together medicine, mathematics, and public health. A summa cum laude graduate of Wabash College with majors in Mathematics and German, David received his PhD in Applied Mathematics from the University of Colorado Boulder and his MD from Indiana University School of Medicine. He was a Fulbright Fellow in Germany in 2015 and the Lillian Gilbreth Postdoctoral Fellow at Purdue Engineering and Stanford Medicine in 2021. During medical school, Gunderman served as President of the Indiana University School of Medicine Medical Student Council, was named one of the Premier 10 graduate students across IU Indianapolis, and received the national U.S. Public Health Service's Excellence in Public Health Award. He serves on the board of Mental Health America–Wabash Valley Region, a nonprofit serving 11 counties and more than 500,000 residents in north-central Indiana. He has taught college- and graduate-level statistics, mathematics, and computer science for nearly a decade and has published more than 25 peer-reviewed research articles.

The Scientech Club provides a forum for weekly presentations and discussions in science, technology, and other topics. The Club meets most Mondays at the Northside Events Center and Social Club (2100 E. 71st Street, Indianapolis, IN 46220.