• Question: How is maths used in Science ?

    Asked by luck2001 to Anna, Chris, Jane, Iain, Nick on 12 Mar 2014.
    • Photo: Anna Middleton

      Anna Middleton answered on 12 Mar 2014:

      Hi luck2001
      Maths is used a lot in science in all sorts of different ways. For example I’m a social scientist so I study the impact of science on people and society – you might think this shouldn’t involve maths, but it does! I’ve got 7000 surveys I’m analysing at the moment, each survey shows the attitudes of an individual towards the use of genetic technology. I want to be able to see how the attitudes vary between country (I’ve got views from 91 different countries) so I need to use statistical tests to look at this. Statistics is just basically maths and how you compare groups to each other.

    • Photo: Chris Cole

      Chris Cole answered on 13 Mar 2014:

      Maths used a lot in science. Without maths you can’t do much science.

      For example, in Chemistry you have to calculate how much of one compound you need to use in a reaction with another in order to make work.

      Or, you can develop equations which describe the swarm patterns of bees.

      Or, you weigh a bunch mice and you need to work out if there’s a real difference in their weight if you change the type of food you’ve given them.

      If you want to do science you need maths.

    • Photo: Iain Moal

      Iain Moal answered on 13 Mar 2014:

      Maths is the language of science, and without it you can’t go very far. For instance, in the sorts of simulations I run, I program the computer to solve mathematical equations which try do fit protein molecules together to see if they can attach to one another, otherwise the computer wouldn’t know what to do.

    • Photo: Jane Charlesworth

      Jane Charlesworth answered on 13 Mar 2014:

      I answered this last night but the computer ate it 🙁

      In my area of research we use maths a lot to make models of scientific questions. For example, I’ve made models to predict how quickly a new mutant form of a gene will spread through a population and then compared my predicted result to some real data. Also, a lot of science uses computer programs to crunch through huge amounts of data and computers speak maths. So whenever I write a computer program I have to translate my biology problem into maths that the computer can understand.

      I second Chris saying that you need maths to do science. But I have to admit that when I was at school, that wasn’t so obvious. If I had it my way, maths lessons would be a lot more hands-on!

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