• Question: Does maths impact(help) in science?

    Asked by _xGODSPLANx_ to Triona, Simone, Kieran, Julia, Hugh, Emily on 6 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: Emily

      Emily answered on 6 Nov 2018:


      Absolutely!

      You always hear your teacher say “You’ll need to be able to do this for every day life!” Well, in my case and the case of all scientists, it’s especially true. Many scientists do math every day in varying ranges of difficulty. Just today I did a number of math problems to work out how much volumes I need of many different solutions in order to run an experiment. I know scientists that do very complicated analysis that requires math that some may find very difficult, but as scientists there’s no giving up when things get hard, is there?

      Thanks for asking!
      Emily

    • Photo: Julia

      Julia answered on 7 Nov 2018:


      Yes, for sure. All the computers software and programmes that I use have a lot of maths behind it’s functioning. Without it I wouldn’t be able to simulate anything.

    • Photo: Hugh Manning

      Hugh Manning answered on 8 Nov 2018:


      Maths helps allot! In every part of my research we need to be able to use maths, when mixing chemicals we need to work out using maths how much of one to add to another to make the reaction happen.
      I use maths when analyzing my data, sometimes I need to multiply the data , or use it in a formula to compare it to another result.
      In the end the results need to be looked at in context of the real world, do the results make sense? Maybe we’re measuring something different to what we thought, maybe we have some other parameter we need to take into account, we can only find this out by taking lots of measurements, using maths to find the average and deviation of our samples.
      When I plot my data on a graph I use maths to write a model for a line which agrees with my results and might give a prediction for results outside of the case I tested.
      Maths is a universal language and it’s much easier to say something in a formula than it is in words and not have it’s meaning changed!

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