May 26, 2016 09:27 PM
Eight great reasons to do maths
https://plus.maths.org/content/great-eight
EXCERPT: In 2012 the UK government identified a list of eight great technologies in which it hopes the UK will be a world leader. These were launched in a speech by the former minister for science David Willetts. The speech has led to an industrial strategy report and a flurry of activity on many websites. It was noticeable that in Willett's speech, in the report, and in the activity it generated, the role of mathematics was only mentioned briefly. This is a symptom of the fact that mathematics still suffers an image problem: it is perceived, widely, to be useless and irrelevant to the modern world. Of course this is very far from the truth, as every (applied) mathematician knows. Indeed mathematics lies at the heart of nearly all of modern technology, as well as much of art and popular culture. In this article I will attempt to show how maths is essential to the eight great technologies and links them all together. Indeed I would argue that they are eight great mathematical technologies, and that they will lead to many breakthroughs in pure mathematics.
The great eight technologies are:
Big Data
Satellites and space
Robotics and autonomous systems
Genomics and synthetic biology
Regenerative medicine
Agricultural science
Advanced materials
Energy and its storage
(More recently, quantum based technology has been added to this list, but we will not go into this here.) So let's have a closer look at these eight great reasons to do maths....
Why quantum mechanics?
https://plus.maths.org/content/why-quantum-mechanics
EXCERPT: Towards the end of the 19th century people thought that physics was done and dusted. Elegant theories described all the natural phenomena people had observed, and only minor details needed tidying up. Over the next few decades, however, alarming cracks started to open up in the theory. Observations showed that, when examined at a very small scale, nature just didn't behave as people thought it should. Quantum mechanics was developed to explain this newly emerging picture. To give you an idea of what was going on, we'll have a brief look at two of those awkward new discoveries....
A ridiculously short introduction to some very basic quantum mechanics
https://plus.maths.org/content/ridiculou...-mechanics
EXCERPT: Quantum mechanics was developed in just two years, 1925 and 1926 (see here if you want to know why). There were initially two versions, one formulated by Werner Heisenberg and one by Erwin Schrödinger. The two tuned out to be equivalent. Here we'll focus on the latter....
https://plus.maths.org/content/great-eight
EXCERPT: In 2012 the UK government identified a list of eight great technologies in which it hopes the UK will be a world leader. These were launched in a speech by the former minister for science David Willetts. The speech has led to an industrial strategy report and a flurry of activity on many websites. It was noticeable that in Willett's speech, in the report, and in the activity it generated, the role of mathematics was only mentioned briefly. This is a symptom of the fact that mathematics still suffers an image problem: it is perceived, widely, to be useless and irrelevant to the modern world. Of course this is very far from the truth, as every (applied) mathematician knows. Indeed mathematics lies at the heart of nearly all of modern technology, as well as much of art and popular culture. In this article I will attempt to show how maths is essential to the eight great technologies and links them all together. Indeed I would argue that they are eight great mathematical technologies, and that they will lead to many breakthroughs in pure mathematics.
The great eight technologies are:
Big Data
Satellites and space
Robotics and autonomous systems
Genomics and synthetic biology
Regenerative medicine
Agricultural science
Advanced materials
Energy and its storage
(More recently, quantum based technology has been added to this list, but we will not go into this here.) So let's have a closer look at these eight great reasons to do maths....
Why quantum mechanics?
https://plus.maths.org/content/why-quantum-mechanics
EXCERPT: Towards the end of the 19th century people thought that physics was done and dusted. Elegant theories described all the natural phenomena people had observed, and only minor details needed tidying up. Over the next few decades, however, alarming cracks started to open up in the theory. Observations showed that, when examined at a very small scale, nature just didn't behave as people thought it should. Quantum mechanics was developed to explain this newly emerging picture. To give you an idea of what was going on, we'll have a brief look at two of those awkward new discoveries....
A ridiculously short introduction to some very basic quantum mechanics
https://plus.maths.org/content/ridiculou...-mechanics
EXCERPT: Quantum mechanics was developed in just two years, 1925 and 1926 (see here if you want to know why). There were initially two versions, one formulated by Werner Heisenberg and one by Erwin Schrödinger. The two tuned out to be equivalent. Here we'll focus on the latter....