• Question: when do you ever use maths in your work?

    Asked by 282hmmb37 to Frank, Ian, Isabel, Jared, Zena on 9 Mar 2015.
    • Photo: Zena Hadjivasiliou

      Zena Hadjivasiliou answered on 9 Mar 2015:

      I use maths in my work all the time! There are many things in nature that are too difficult to understand using everyday language. This can be because the problem we are interested in is too complex to think of in words or because there is an element of the problem that goes against our intuition. Equations provide an amazing language that can help us here.

      For example, in my work I am looking at the way cells “talk” to each other. Did you know cells could actually communicate with each other? One common way of communication between cells is using chemical signals. These chemical signals move around in space in a way that is difficult to understand but there are some cool equations that can describe the behaviour of these chemical signals very accurately. Using these equations helps us understand how cells manage to tell things to one another!

    • Photo: Frank Longford

      Frank Longford answered on 9 Mar 2015:

      Just like Zena I use maths all the time too and I’m sure you do too. A computer “computes” equations – that’s how it works! Any time I need to investigate something new in my research I need to come up with a way to explain it to a computer, which involves maths. For me maths is the tools that helps us explain how our theories work – each part of an equation is like a part of a machine and coding a program is like building a car.

      If I’m honest however, I didn’t enjoy learning maths at school because I couldn’t see the link between my life and what I was studying at the time. I quite enjoyed it in the same way you might enjoy doing a sudoku puzzle but I never thought I would really need it. Now I actually enjoy maths much more because I’m using it everyday and so I understand it a lot more too. So basically don’t underestimate maths, you might need it later!

    • Photo: Ian Sandal

      Ian Sandal answered on 9 Mar 2015:

      Like Zena and Frank I also use Maths everyday this can be for fairly straightforward things like working out what volume of different chemicals is needed for a particular process or to calculate how long a chemical reaction might take. Again like Frank and Zena I also make use of computers to solve more difficult equations.

      For my work this normally involves how light interacts with electrical material. – Did you know that a particle of light (called a photon) and an electrical charge (called an electron) talk to each other, and sometimes one can destroy the other (or create a new one). For example when light is shone on some materials it makes electricity (like a solar cell)! Infact a plane powered only by solar cells took off today. These interactions can be understood, predicted and controlled via equations so we use computers to try and solve them.

    • Photo: Jared Parnell

      Jared Parnell answered on 9 Mar 2015:

      I use maths to work out the movement of light inside the eye, and create patterns for 3D displays.

      Maths is just another language for describing the world (a language I am not very good at!), and I use it often but computers do a lot of the work for us now. I use very complicated maths which I just couldn’t do myself but the computer does it in seconds.

      It can help a lot to know the language of maths, to help describe the way things work. If you see difficult equations it can be very confusing at first but if you find the right way to imagine it, or get a good teacher to explain it well then it can all seem a lot simpler. I have learned a lot more maths since starting my PhD but I also rely on my friends and teachers a lot.

    • Photo: Isabel Pires

      Isabel Pires answered on 9 Mar 2015:

      Even though I am a Biologist (and some people do think biologists don’t like maths), in my lab we use maths all the time 🙂

      Here are some examples on how we use maths:

      As it was already mentioned, we need maths to determine how to prepare chemical solutions. Chemical solutions are used for everything in a lab, including figuring out how much of a particular new medicine you need to give to cancer cells in an experiment.

      We also use maths to determine how many cells we have in a dish, which helps us to setup an experiment using these cells. We normally need to use very specific cell numbers for each particular experiment type.

      We use maths all the time to analyse our results. The results we get for many types of experiments (for example those used to see how toxic a specific chemical or new medicine is for a cancer cell, or how much of a gene is being made into protein in a specific condition) are presented as numbers , and we need maths to make sense of all of it all.

      Finally, we always use maths to check whether our results are significant (that is, whether the effect we see is real or just random), using statistics. Most of my students don’t like statistics but they are an essential tool for a biologist.

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